May’s National Geographic pictured a very impressive One Hundred Trillion Dollar bill from the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, which in November of 2008 hit the 79.6 billion percent level for inflation before stabilizing their currency. Check out the 100T note here. You can buy one of your own for less than ten bucks USD!
Meanwhile back home in here in the USA everyone is up in arms over a measly 0.1 percent difference in inflation caused by “chaining” our CPI. The gist of this is explained in this recent Time-magazine personal-finance column. It seems like much ado about very little. However, those who get cost-of-living adjustments (COLA) fight like crazy over anything that reduces their income. Here’s a spin on statistics: A 0.1 percent reduction from 1.5 percent is actually a 7 percent loss in COLA. No wonder seniors want to throw off those chains!
The fiddling with money supply and shenanigans on inflation computations reached a new low not long ago in Argentina when the government forced out statistician Graciela Bevacqua for rounding rather than dropping decimal points, which made the government look better with their official rate. It’s all reported here by The Economist. Now working in private industry Bevacqua continued to present a truer calculation on inflation and got fined $100,000 for her honesty. After an uproar from far and wide, including the American Statistical Association (ASA), the courts in Argentina overruled the government and spared this outspoken statistician, according to this news from Buenos Aires Herald. Someone ought to give her a medal for speaking the truth. But as the great statistician George E. P. Box said:
“Whenever we see virtue rewarded, we are completely surprised.”