Monday 9 March 2009

Fun Online Poll Results: The worst kind of inflation

The response to the question "Now we've seen what happens when a house price-cum-credit bubble bursts, what's the worst kind of inflation?" was as follows:

House price inflation - 57% (47%)
Retail price inflation - 25% (25%)
Wage inflation - 10% (13%)
Other (please specify in comments) - 15% (9%)


A lot of the comments seemed to centre around the idea that all inflation is bad (agreed, that's doesn't stop some inflation being worse than others) or more subtly, that the answer depended on your personal situation - for a pensioner, RPI is the worst and for a tenant looking to become a First Time Buyer, house price inflation is the worst (agreed as well, but that doesn't stop each individual answer being valid, so does not invalidate the whole poll). I'm not sure who out there doesn't like pay rises (except employers).

I ran the poll for a few days just on this 'blog and then linked to it at HousePriceCrash. The percentages in brackets relate to votes via this site alone, as half the votes came via this 'blog and half via HPC, you can see that there was a shift from 'other' to 'house price inflation' but the results weren't massively different.

My real point is that all forms of inflation are probably equally bad, so the least-worst kind of inflation is one where everything increases in line with each other. Higher interest rates should compensate savers against a fall in value of their savings.

Anyway, seeing as it's Monday morning, and seeing as of how the government has repeatedly plucked figures out of the air saying we all drink 'too much', here's your chance to have a say in my equally scientific survey, "How much alcohol do you drink every week?", see widget in sidebar.

3 comments:

AntiCitizenOne said...

To me, the question was a bit like "What's the best part of being in a hurricane?"

Mark Wadsworth said...

The best part of a hurricane is the middle bit, that's easy.

Anonymous said...

Economic indicators show that inflation threats are right around the corner. Eric Fry of the Rude Awakening examines 6 ETFs and how to prepare for the “near-certain arrival of inflation.” He says now is the time to be wary of price increases and these ETFs act as an “insurance policy” to hedge against them.

http://www.contrarianprofits.com/articles/why-it%E2%80%99s-time-to-be-paranoid-about-inflation-risk/14566