The Daily Price of Food and Drink

Wow!  Who needs Yanqui Mike´s old screenshots of a dozen 2005 food prices in Buenos Aires when you can track how much your morfi favorito went up TODAY.

Brian McMahon in Córdoba turned me onto this website, www.InflacionVerdadera.com, and I think I might be lookin´ in on it quite a bit this year.

Brian is an economist who worked for several years doing research on markets and industries for the Commercial Section of the US Embassy in Buenos Aires. He´s lived here in Argentina for 24 years, 13 of them in Buenos Aires. Some members may remember his weekly column in the Buenos Aires Herald among a wide range of other media.  He also chaired Democrats Abroad Argentina´s Nomination Committee this year.

InflacionVerdadera.com  takes as its base, data from The Billion Prices Project which was started by two members of the MIT Sloan faculty in 2007.  They track online prices for five million individual items from supermarkets to real estate, and more ...from over 70 countries ...every single day.  The result is an Internet-based resource that measures price changes from around the world and gives real-time inflation estimates.

Our guys here in Argentina then take that data and flesh it out daily with prices for 140 more online food and beverage items from 2 large supermarket chains.

They then produce two figures:
►El Indice de Alimentos y Bebidas
►El Indice de la Canasta Básica Alimentaria

The first index is a food and drink portion of the entire Consumer Price Index in Argentina.  The second index only tracks the basic marketbasket items that the government uses in its calculations of the poverty line.

There´s loads of other features ...and more to come according to the site.

Right now, as of today, InflacionVerdadera.com is showing a 31% annualized inflation in food and drink ...but blessedly only 1% over the last 30 days.

Billion Prices Project which tracks a much wider range of products puts the annual inflation rate at 36% in Argentina.