Japan: $12.3 million
United States: $7.5 million
Hong Kong: $2.2 million
South Korea: $1.1 million
Mexico City: $365,000
UK: 16.3% . . .
Brazil: 22.7% . . .
Bolivia: 42.5% . . .
Indonesia: 50.6% . . .
Albania: 69.2% . . . 
Netherlands: $36 . . .
Spain: $26 . . . 
Serbia: $119 . . .
Turkey: $220 . . .
Australia: $241 . . .
Germany: $266 . . .
Portugal: $320 . . .
Greece: $718 . . . 
France:1.5% ($333) . . .
Luxembourg: 2.4% ($820) . . .
Russia: 3.5% ($280) . . .
You don’t trust your government to provide reliable inflation data? Is the central bank tinkering with the numbers to help the president get re-elected? The number crunchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have come up with a way to keep them honest. MIT’s Billion Prices Project has constructed alternative consumer price indexes from a data-base of prices of 5 million individual items from super markets and other retailers in 70 countries.
The Argentine consumer price index says that inflation has been stuck around 11% a year since July? According to the Billion Price Project it’s running at an annual rate of nearly 21%. In the United States, too, the BPP suggests prices are rising faster than the Fed would have us believe: 2.2% a year compared to 1.1% reported by the CPI. That is good news. It suggest that growth might be faster than we think.
I thank Free Exchange for the pointer.
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