Three-Digit Salute
What are we to do now that the Central Bank has stopped even pretending it’s one day going to start publishing timely inflation statistics again?
Well, you could wave your hands and say “marico esta vaina es hiperinflación.”
Or you could run 5,456 regressions using various combinations of 33 published statistical indicators to estimate the Consumer Price Index over the last year.
Bank of America is into the latter method. (Virtually everyone else seems to favor the former one.)
The outcome? Inflation is likely running at around 101% over the last 12 months (95% confidence interval says the real rate is between 88% and 110%).
In the first four months of 2015, though, the average monthly inflation rate was 8.5%. On an annualized basis, we’re looking at 165% inflation in Jan-April 2015.
For those keeping score at home, that’s still some way from the 50%-per-month figure normally agreed to constitute hyperinflation. But the direction of travel is entirely clear.
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