COMMENT | If you walked into your usual kopitiam this morning and the kuey teow still costs what it did last month, you may have come away thinking the diesel crisis is someone else’s problem.

However, the truth is the opposite: your bill has not yet moved because the person behind the counter is absorbing the cost on your behalf.

The most important question for households over the next six months is not whether prices will rise. It is when, and by how much, as soon as businesses are no longer able to afford the absorption.

At a closed-door roundtable recently convened by the Institute of Strategic Analysis and Policy Research (Insap), this was the dominant pattern across food and beverage, retail, vegetable wholesalers, tourism, manufacturing and construction.

A flash survey of local small and medium enterprises (SMEs) conducted by the Small and Medium Enterprises Association of Malaysia (Samenta) and tabled at the roundtable captured it with unusual clarity.