The U.S. inflation rate hit 5.4% before scaling back a bit to 5%—rates which have raised alarms among investors, economists and most importantly the financial press. But how bad are these recent jumps in consumer prices compared with the rest of the world?
If you look at inflation rates for other countries, our current CPI rate doesn’t look quite so alarming. It’s true that there are countries with lower inflation, like Spain (2.7%), the United Kingdom (2.1-2.5%), Israel (1.5-1.7%), France (1.4-1.5%) and Australia (0.9-1.1%). Japan, Ecuador and the Cayman Islands are actually experiencing mild deflation this year. But inflation is considerably more rampant in places like Turkey (17%), Ethiopia (20%), Iran (47%), Argentina (48%), Lebanon (121%) and the inflation champion of the world, Venezuela (2,700-2,900% inflation).
In fact, the Trading Economics website lists 52 countries that have inflation rates higher than the U.S. If you count all the nations that have roughly similar cost of living increases, our nation is somewhere in the middle of the pack, behind Russia (6%) and India (6.3%), ahead of Poland (4.5%) and Iceland (4.3%).
Sources:
https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/inflation-rate