“You go to the grocery store, you buy something at a price today,” she said, but then the next day, it costs more. Maria Cícera da Silva lives with her daughter and granddaughter in a 160-square-foot apartment in Rocinha, a poor hillside neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro. In Tunisia, a shortage of subsidized food items like sugar, coffee, flour and eggs has shuttered cafes and emptied market shelves.īrazil has cut fuel taxes and increased social welfare payments, but soaring prices remain a daily struggle. In Indonesia this month, thousands of protesters, angry over a 30 percent price increase on subsidized fuel, clashed with the police. For some, it could affect their health or leave them feeling isolated. Food Prices : Rising prices at grocery stores and restaurants have changed the way many seniors shop and eat out.Investing on Chickens: As a spike in egg prices spooks consumers, some are taking steps to secure their own future supply by snapping up chicks that will grow into egg-laying chickens.The Fed’s Strategy: The Fed is aiming to get inflation down to 2%.Taming Inflation: The Federal Reserve’s success or failure at reining in surging prices will affect your wallet and, maybe, the next election, our columnist says.Understand Inflation and How It Affects You The dollar is clobbering other currencies as well, including the Brazilian real, the South Korean won and the Tunisian dinar. The euro, used by 19 nations across Europe, reached 1-to-1 parity with the dollar in June for the first time since 2002. Roughly 40 percent of the world’s transactions are done in dollars, whether the United States is involved or not, according to a study done by the International Monetary Fund.Īnd now, the value of the dollar compared with other major currencies like the Japanese yen has reached a decades-long high. So is a lot of the debt owed by developing nations. Energy and food tend to be priced in dollars when bought and sold on the world market. That is because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency - the one that multinational corporations and financial institutions, no matter where they are, most often use to price goods and settle accounts. When it comes to global finance and trade, though, its influence is outsize. The United States is a superpower with the world’s largest economy and hefty reserves of oil and natural gas. Policy decisions made in Washington frequently reverberate widely. At the same time, he said, the Fed has no choice but to act aggressively to control inflation: “Any delay in action could make things potentially even worse.” “For the rest of the world, it’s a no-win situation,” said Eswar Prasad, an economics professor at Cornell and author of several books on currencies.
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