Price Inflation: A Report from South America

John Meagher emails:

Dear Bob,

I really enjoy the work you are doing. Thank you for your efforts, it is a pleasure to read your blog.

I have been living in Sao Paulo, Brazil for about a year and travel quite extensively through S.A. I just got back from a trip to Lima and Santiago de Chile. On separate days, headlines for major newspapers in each of these cities were speaking quite openly about inflation.

In Peru, there were several articles talking about how inflation was higher than the Peruvian Central Bank’s goal, coming in at 4.74% annually.

The front page of ‘El Financiero’ in Chile on the 12th had a headline that read (rough translation):

“The price of food is increasing: CPI (for food) has increased 10% over the past 12 months”

Not only are we inflating our economies but we are causing great damage to those economies which import a great deal of things from the US, namely food and other commodities.

Keep up the good work.

The price inflation that is developing is going to be near global. It may result in huge panic buying of gold around the world. Paper currency will only be used as tissue to wrap the gold coins so they won't get scratched.