Argentina's Mileise: yearly inflation soars to 288% - the highest in the world

Inflation in Argentina is now running at 287.9%, figures released on Friday afternoon by the government’s INDEC statistics bureau showed.

The number, 9.7 points higher than February’s, indicates that Argentina’s runaway price hikes remain the worst in the world.

Monthly inflation cooled to 11% in March, a two-point drop from February, according to the report. The number marks the third monthly decrease in a row after it hit 25.5% in December, the highest since February 1991.

Cumulative inflation since far-right President Javier Milei was elected in November has surpassed 90%, in four months.

The biggest monthly increase was in education, which was driven up 52.7% by the rise in private school fees - pushing hundreds of thousands of middle-class families into the already-strained public school system.

It was followed by telecommunications, up 15.9% mainly due to phone and internet bills. Then came housing, up 13.3% off the back of rising electricity bills.

“The recession, the drop in revenues, and the drop in sales are the reasons behind the lower [monthly] rate,” said Sebastián Menescaldi, associate director of EcoGo consultancy, adding that it was “not good news.”

Argentine consumers and businesses have since been walloped by utility rate hikes averaging 200% for electricity, and 300% for gas - which analysts believe might push April inflation to up to 20% monthly.

At: https://buenosairesherald.com/economics/argentinas-yearly-inflation-soars-to-288

A popular Argentine meme ridicules far-right President Javier Milei after he asserted this week that "prices are falling like a piano" after consulting a Bot account that purportedly measured prices at Jumbo - a Chilean-owned supermarket chain popular in Argentina.

The administrator of the Bot account promptly revealed that it was an unofficial "social experiment that never analyzed prices."

A doubling in annual inflation rates since October - the month before Milei was elected - to 288%, has pushed an estimated 6 million Argentines into poverty just as of January.

And massive utility rate hikes of 200 to 300% in April have triggered a wave of small business closures and layoffs.