Post-Covid Inflation Heavily Influenced by Global Factors – Currency Thoughts
Post-Covid Inflation Heavily Influenced by Global Factors
March 16, 2026
National inflationary trends this decade have by and large followed a similar pattern. Consumer price inflation peaked in June 2022 at 9.1% in the United States, at 8.1% in Canada and at 10.6% in Euroland. The British and Turkish CPI peaks of 11.1% and 85.5% happened in October 2022. Swiss inflation crested at 3.5% a couple of months earlier in August, and the Swedish peak of 12.3 was in December 2022. Japan’s inflation peak of 4.3% wasn’t touched until January 2023. Cyclical highs of 5.95% in Indonesia, 7.8% in both India and South Africa, 12.1% in Brazil and 8.7% in Mexico were respectively touched in September, April, July, April and September of 2022. The common thread faced by these varied economies from five different continents was the severe supply-chain bottlenecks after self-imposed pandemic restrictions were lifted. It took a lot longer than anticipated to unravel the mess as pent-up demand outstripped available supply coming gradually back on board.
One thing that has become apparent around the world over the past 75 years is that voter satisfaction is much more likely to crumble under the weight of a rapid rise in price inflation than a cycle of rising unemployment. A prime test case of those priorities involved the reelection of Ronald Reagan in 1984 after a first term that saw high joblessness but also a significant drop of inflation. Forty years later, a democratic presidency failed to be reelected after a term characterized by respectable growth, low unemployment, but the aforementioned spike in inflation. Given that America’s inflation in 2021-2 was part of a widely shared international pattern, it was deceitful of President Trump to pin the blame for inflation squarely on his predecessor, but quite understandable because it’s in the very nature of politicians in opposition when challenging an incumbent to find areas of voter dissatisfaction and rightly or as in this case wrongly blame the problem entirely on their predecessor.
After cresting within a tight span of time, CPI inflation decelerated to as low as 2.3% in the United States in April 2025, 1.7% in Euroland in September 2024, -0.1% in Switzerland in September 2025, 0.2% in Sweden in May 2025, 1.7% in the U.K. in September 2024, -0.1% in India in February 2025, 3.5% in Mexico in July 2025, 2.7% in South Africa in March 2025, 30.65% in Turkey in January 2026 and 1.9% in Japan in January 2026.
Late in President Biden’s presidency, disinflation had progressed a tad beyond its latest reading of 2.5% by touching 2.4% in September 2024. The behavior of the personal consumption price deflator — a year-on-year 2.8% rise last month versus 2.3% in September 2024 and a core rate last month of 3.1%, up from 2.6% in April 2025 — also paints a picture of stalled disinflation so far during Trump’s second term. To be fair, inflation hasn’t spiked anew like it did in 2021-22. However, it’s also true that U.S. inflation would have had a better chance of actually returning to the targeted 2.0% promised land had Trump not pursued a number of policy changes that had pro-inflationary implications. These included an immigration policy that vastly slowed growth in the labor force, sharp tariff increases that were rolled out in a highly erratic and unpredictable fashion, launching war in the Middle East, and a relentless harassment of the Federal Reserve that undermined confidence that U.S. monetary policy will remain free from political meddling. In the United States during the early 1970’s and in other countries such as Turkey, Hungary, Argentina, the U.K., and Brazil at other times in history, one finds a correlation between political involvement in matters of monetary policy and higher inflation.
Copyright 2026, Larry Greenberg. All rights reserved.
Tags: placing blame for above-target U.S. inflation
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