Sunday, June 7, 2015

Ukraine's Hyper-Inflation

NYT reports:
While the rest of Europe tries desperately to shrug off low inflation, Ukraine has added rapidly rising prices to its long list of problems during its civil war with Russian-backed rebels. Official inflation figures showed that prices rose 61 percent in April compared with a year earlier. But many prices have doubled and tripled.

Ms. Verchenko, a 37-year-old mother of two boys and a professor at the Kiev School of Economics, specializes in arcane subjects like options pricing, but she took some time to explain less esoteric market dynamics. Like the price of candy.

She once bought chocolates from Roshen, the company owned by the Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, for about 80 Ukrainian hryvnia a kilogram, or $3.89. Now they are 203.

“You can see inflation in those candies,” she said during a visit to a grocery store near her office.

The price of everything seems to have gone up sharply, including tea, apples and fresh fish.

At a glass display case, she pointed to slices of cake. The prices were quoted for every hundred grams, instead of per kilogram as they once were.

“Before it was always per kilo, but now you have too many numbers,” she said. “It looks better like that. You don’t want to scare your customers away.”

When she recently went shopping for a mattress, she noticed that prices were missing entirely.

For many bigger ticket items, she said, “They don’t really put price tags out anymore.”

“You choose what you want, you ask how much it is, and then you see whether you can afford it or not.”
Always study hyper-inflation in other countries, it will better prepare you if it ever happens here---that and a lot of gold coins.

  -RW

2 comments:

  1. You can't say "rebels". It has to be "Russian-backed" rebels. Free press. hardeeharhar

    ReplyDelete
  2. NYT... propaganda, propaganda, and even more propaganda. They didn't bother to mention that inflation is caused my Ukraine govt's frenzy of money printing needed to finance the bombing of its own citizens.

    ReplyDelete