The American penchant for ignoring the rest of the world never ceases to amaze me. And so, after reading my N-hundreth story about U.S. inflation rate — with nary a whisper about the rest of the world — I felt motivated to blog about the elephant in this particular room.
Much of the reporting on U.S. inflation is fundamentally idiotic. It’s noise generated for political advantage, with no content. It’s all about exploiting an opportunity for finger-pointing. It lacks substance because all of that reporting assumes there’s some unique U.S. cause to our unique U.S. inflation.
I was going to invest maybe a whole ten minutes in looking up the current inflation rate in selected countries. But this is the age of the internet. Maybe somebody put all that information in one convenient place.
So that, if for some peculiar reason, you, as an American, actually wanted to know what the inflation rate was in countries other than the U.S.A., you wouldn’t even have to search for it. Just look it up on the Financial Times website.
This takes the drama out of doing this one country at a time, but it gets right down to the bottom line. Here are graphs of the inflation rate in the U.S., North America, Europe, Asia (other than China), and the world as a whole. (I exclude China because they don’t have a credible domestic inflation measure.) These are all taken from the Financial Times website.
Notice anything?
Now it’s time for Occam’s Razor. On the one hand, maybe each of these countries has some unique, specific factors boosting their individual rates of inflation. Simultaneously.
Or, just maybe, something has happened world-wide, to cause prices to rise. But it’s so tough to imagine what could possibly account for an increase in inflation in almost the entire industrialized world. It’s not as if these countries had anything in common over the past couple of years.
In any event, this is why I’ve had my fill of U.S. reporting on inflation. It’s just so damned dumb. The endless blather about why it’s due to this, that, or the other uniquely American factor. The constant drumbeat of whom to blame for it. But mostly, the absolute unwillingness to take five minutes, look around, and note that this is not an American issue, it’s a global phenomenon.
