Miguel Bein, O J Ferreres, Aldo Ferrer, Lenicov. People who actually live and work in this country. Even the ex-director of INDEC, Bevacqua, said that their IPC is a bit lower.
Your source? Two foriegn newspapers quoting people that nobody knows.
I am sorry to disagree but I think I will bealive the economists that I mentioned above.
Cheers!
One of the "foreign newspapers nobody knows" is the Financial Times, which is the world's preeminent English Language daily newspaper reporting on finance and economics. It wildly surpasses the credibility of Miguel Bein, who appears to be little more than Cristina Fernandez' butt buddy. I haven't been able to find a single scholarly article published by him via scholar.google.com.ar, nor can I even find evidence of his economic credentials online (aside from on his own website) which seriosuly puts his Economic credibility into question. I would recommend seeking opinions from economists that have no political affiliations to avoid bias. Obviously the economist hired by the president will not contradict her opinions publicly...
Regarding the Inflation statistics, the are difficult to estimate because our brains are not designed for statistics. We are likely to to be overweighting the large price increases and underweighting the lower price increases to be arriving at an estimate that is slightly higher than the official rate because it is in line with our expectations. It's a natural bias that all humans succumb to.
It is also unfair to annualize a monthly inflation figure because it essentially is projecting forward January's inflation rate which is highly skewed due to the devaluation in the official rate. However, most people are projected a further decrease of over 20-25 percent in the official rate in 2014 so persistently higher inflation will continue. Furthermore, the full extent of the devaluation is probably not yet present in all prices, as old product stocks are probably still being depleted, and have yet to be replaced with new imports.
What bothers me about the debate is that nobody seems to be mentioning the role of the central bank in all of this. Price controls are always doomed to fail, history has served as a precedent for that over and over. This country needs some major monetary tightening.
Oh, and also, now that INDEC is reporting the real inflation rate, will they backdate it and modify all the economic statistics that are highly influenced by inflation? I'm thinking GDP for one which has been overstated wildly due to falsely low inflation statistics. Poverty rates are another statistic which will be wildly wrong assuming 10% inflation over the last several years. The GDP item is particularly damning because the government is currently paying out billions of dollars on GDP-linked government bonds. Interesting considering the GDP statistic is wildly inaccurate due to the underestimation of inflation. (Note GDP needs to be "deflated" by inflation - the inflation rate in economics is also referred to as the "GDP Deflator"). It makes you wonder why the government would choose to payout billions in unnecessary interest payments on a class of bonds due to a statistic they modified, especially at a time when debt payments are a large burden for the nation. Unless of course those people in government were major investors in those bonds....
