At the top of the Wall Street Journal, US inflation “reaches new four-decade high”, at 8.6% year-on-year, “due to broad gains in prices”. He highlighted fuel and food and housing costs, “an indicator of broad inflationary pressures.”
But Joe Biden, in the New York Times, reverted to “Putin’s price hikes” for an inflation that actually dates back to last year — arising from the excess stimulus to get the economy back on track. In the newspaper’s statement, the US president wants to “list inflation as a global problem”, not of his government.
Not quite, as evidenced by an editorial decision by the Financial Times, which is still based in London but is controlled by the Nikkei of Tokyo, Asia.
The financial newspaper adopted, to monitor global inflation in real time, a map of the world with the proportions changed for the size of the population of each country (below). Japan, for example, is now twice as large as the UK.
The map shows that Asia, with 2.1% inflation in China, 2.5% in Japan, 3.5% in Indonesia and 2.9% in Vietnam, among others, is still far from the soaring western inflation.
The newly released figures for May, according to the South China Morning Post, show that the rise in prices has maintained the level in China – and the projection for the also giant India is even a fall, according to the Indian Business Today, with Reuters, in the announcement scheduled for Monday.
Russia also noted a drop in inflation, prompting its central bank to announce the fourth rate cut since March, as reported in the home pages of the same WSJ and FT.
According to the Nikkei, China has increased its purchases of Russian oil in the last three months compared to the same period last year by 70%; and India increased by “eightfold”, which, reckons an Indian economist, helped to hold prices in the country.
In the words of the Japanese newspaper, the two Asian giants are spearheading “a dramatic reshuffle of the global energy trade”, which also includes Europeans turning to African oil — and to conflicts on the continent.
This world in dramatic remodeling is portrayed in the FT cartogram, which in turn was based on what was developed by Our World in Data, the academic portal that has focused on monitoring the pandemic in the last two and a half years.
It is “the map we need if we want to think about how living conditions are changing in the world”.
