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Argentina's inflation rate year over year October 2024 to Oct 2025
Graphic Truth: Inflation plunges in Argentina
Argentina’s president Javier Milei inherited inflation that was over 200%, but after 18 consecutive months of it falling, it now stands at just 31%. While that is still one of the world’s highest, it is an impressive improvement. It comes as the US has sought to prop up Argentina’s economy, recently giving nearly $1 billion of its International Monetary Fund reserves to help Argentina make a critical debt payment to the IMF. The transaction follows the US recently providing Argentina with a $20 billion currency swap to stabilize the peso.
South Sudan President Salva Kiir prepares to welcome Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni at the Juba International Airport, ahead of meetings aimed at averting a new civil war after South Sudan's First Vice President Riek Machar was placed under house arrest, in Juba, South Sudan April 3, 2025.
What We’re Watching: More political chaos in South Sudan, Tehran runs dry
South Sudan’s president fires another VP
President Salva Kiir continued to take a wrecking ball to his country’s leadership structure this week, firing Benjamin Bol Mel, who was one of his vice presidents. He also sacked the central bank governor and the head of the revenue authority without giving reasons for the removals. The move comes after President Kiir in March put then-Vice President Rick Machar under house arrest, before charging him with murder in September – Kiir and Machar had entered a power-sharing agreement to end the civil war. Experts are concerned that Kiir’s moves will pull the sub-Saharan state back into civil war, only five years after it ended.
Iran’s water crisis threatens to empty Tehran
Iran may have to evacuate its capital Tehran – home to 10 million people – if it doesn’t rain by December, according to its President Masoud Pezeshkian. The water crisis is due to decades of mismanagement and inefficient agriculture practices, compounded by a lack of access to new technology because of international sanctions. It comes as Iranians are also enduring frequent electricity and gas shortages, heightening the risk that civil unrest could destabilize the regime.
September 28, 2025, Tehran, Iran: Iranian lawmakers participate in an open session of parliament. Iran has recalled its envoys to Britain, France, and Germany for consultations after the three countries.
Do additional sanctions on Iran make a difference now?
The European Union confirmed on Monday that it has reinstated sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program, following the United Nations’ decision over the weekend to reimpose its own penalties.
The move piles fresh punishment onto an economy already battered by a collapsing currency, soaring inflation and deficits, and chronic shortages of water and energy. Iran is also still reeling from the 12-day war in June, which included US airstrikes on its three main nuclear sites and a wave of Israeli attacks on sensitive government targets.
What’s in these sanctions? They reinstate bans on arms imports and on the transfer of dual-use technologies that could support a nuclear program. The measures also freeze the assets of individuals linked to Iran’s missile and nuclear efforts, impose travel bans on sanctioned officials, and authorize inspections of Iranian cargo, including oil shipments. All of this comes atop extensive financial sanctions that the US has imposed since 2018.
Why are they called “snapback” sanctions? They were previously lifted, as part of a 2015 nuclear deal between Iran, the US, and Europe, on the condition that Iran continue to allow international inspection of its nuclear programs to ensure that they are for peaceful use. The US exited that deal in 2018, reimposing sanctions, but European partners continued some of its terms. After the war with Israel, Iran suspended access to inspectors, opening the way for these sanctions to automatically “snap back” into place.
Economic impact. The effects are already rippling out over Iran’s currency markets. The rial is now trading at more than a million per US dollar and fell another 4% on the black market on Saturday. That slide is eroding the purchasing power of the middle class and squeezing quality of life. Eurasia Group Iran expert Greg Brew described the sanctions’ practical impact as “largely symbolic and psychological,” warning that they will deepen public disillusionment by reducing prospects for diplomacy and long-promised sanctions relief.
“The impact of the last few years of sanctions has been to increase inequality in Iran,” says Brew. “More of the wealth and more of the power is moving upward, while the middle class has been squeezed and shrunk.”
Could that generate a fresh wave of protests? Possibly, as Iran has seen a number of economic-driven protests in recent years. But the political impact would likely be limited, in Brew’s view. "Iran has no organized political opposition,” he says, “There's really no locus around which the opposition can mobilize and the internal repressive apparatus is still as large and as powerful as it has always been, if not more."
Nuclear diplomacy stalled. The purpose of the sanctions is to pressure Iran to return to meeting its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which requires Tehran to forswear nuclear weapons development and accept international inspections.
"What we're looking at in the short term is Iran remaining within the NPT in name only," says Brew. Since the 12-day War, Iran has been skirting the treaty’s spirit by denying inspectors access to key facilities and refusing to clarify the status of its enriched uranium. The regime has made the decision to weather more sanctions rather than allow international inspections, underscoring the question: what, exactly, is going on at Iran’s nuclear facilities now?Graphic Truth: What’s behind the US inflation numbers?
US prices rose 2.7% over the 12 months until July 2025, a relatively steady rate despite the onset of President Donald Trump’s tariffs. But what’s behind this inflation figure? This Graphic Truth explores how the prices of various categories of consumer goods are changing.
An oil tanker is being loaded at Saudi Aramco's Ras Tanura oil refinery and oil terminal in Saudi Arabia May 21, 2018.
Hard Numbers: OPEC+ further expands oil output, Ukraine attacks drone corruption, UK releases gonorrhoea vaccine, & More
547,000: OPEC Plus, the eight-member oil cartel de facto led by Saudi Arabia, announced on Sunday it would increase oil production by 547,000 barrels a day, the latest in a series of increases that first started in April. In response, oil prices dropped more than 2% on Monday.
6: Anti-corruption authorities in Ukraine charged six people with embezzling funds intended for drone purchases in a “large-scale” bribery scheme. The arrests include one sitting legislator, a National Guard commander, two officials, and two businessmen.
100,000: The United Kingdom rolled out its gonorrhoea vaccines on Sunday, a move that the National Health Service believes will prevent 100,000 cases of the sexually transmitted infection. The vaccine is 30-40% effective, but the hope is that it will stem the growing number of antibiotic-resistant cases of the infection.
12: Former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe was sentenced to 12 years under house arrest on Friday for witness tampering and fraud. He was also barred from public office and fined $578,000, but the right-wing ex-leader plans to appeal the conviction.
0000: Iran’s parliament proposed cutting four zeros from is currency, the rial, as decades of high inflation, sanctions and economic mismanagement have eroded its value. The proposed change would aim to simplify financial accounting and reduce printing costs.U.S. President Donald Trump speaks next to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell during a tour of the Federal Reserve Board building, which is currently undergoing renovations, in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 24, 2025.
Why is Trump threatening the Fed, and why does it matter?
On Thursday afternoon, just before golden hour, President Donald Trump threw a white hardhat over his flaxen coif and strode into the Federal Reserve building on Constitution Avenue.
The stated purpose of his visit to the world’s most influential central bank was almost comically mundane: he was there to inspect a building renovation project for cost overruns. Trump is, as he likes to remind people, a “builder,” so he knows an overpriced crown molding when he sees one. He says the $2.5-billion project, funded by Congress, is already more than $500 million over budget. The Fed disputes this number.
Sure enough, after a walking tour of the sites with Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, the two men sparred about the costs of the buildings that are currently being rebuilt by the Fed – and at least one that is not being built because, as Powell gamely pointed out, it was already built five years ago.
But the hardhat haggling was pantomime for a more serious dispute.
For weeks now, Trump has been insulting and pressuring the “numbskull” Powell to lower interest rates, in hopes that doing so will give the US economy, “the hottest in the world,” a boost. The midterms are, after all, approaching.
But Powell isn’t budging. He argues that with Trump’s tariff threats still nudging up prices, lower rates could set inflation soaring all over again. The Fed’s legally-mandated job is to keep inflation low and growth humming – without presidential meddling.
More alarmingly, Trump has recently pondered removing Powell – whom he nominated as Fed chair eight years ago – before his term ends next spring. Doing so would be an unprecedented assault on the Fed’s independence. Under the law, a president can sack a Fed chair only for serious violations of the law or ethics.
Disagreements over interest rate policy are not that. But an allegedly botched building renovation that has cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in cost overruns? Maybe it’s malfeasance enough. And while Trump said yesterday that firing Powell because of cost overruns would be a “a big move” that is “not necessary” right now, the visit sends a clear message: this is an issue that can be brought up again if Powell doesn’t, as Trump insists, “do the right thing.”
So what is “Fed independence”? And why is it a problem if it suffers?
To learn more I rang up one of the smartest global economy analysts out there – Rob Kahn, Managing Director of Global Macro at Eurasia Group. Our exchange has been edited for clarity and concision. Here goes.
Rob, why is central bank independence so important, and to whom?
When a central bank is subservient to the government, it will often make decisions to keep interest rates too low. And as a result you get too much money printed up and then more inflation.
There is a vast body of evidence that says that economies that have independent central banks do better. They tend to have lower inflation and higher growth. When everyone – financial markets, firms, households – can make longer-term investment and spending decisions based on stable accurate expectations about what the future will hold, they make better decisions and they have better outcomes.
Economies just perform better when individuals have reasonably stable expectations about what inflation's going to be this year, next year, five years from now.
If Trump forces Powell to cut rates, or replaces him with someone who does that, what might happen?
The first thing to remind people of is that the Fed doesn’t actually control all the interest rates in the economy. They control the so-called “federal funds rate,” which is the rate at which banks lend to each other. By doing that, they can influence all the other interest rates in the economy, but they don’t control them directly.
If the Fed were perceived to be cutting rates under pressure from Donald Trump, you might see that even though the Fed funds rate went down, other lenders would say, “Wow, in the longer term we’re going to have higher inflation, so we’re going to actually need higher interest rates ahead of that.” So even though the Fed rate goes down, the market rates for a lot of people could actually go up.
Why is Trump’s hardhat visit so alarming for people worried about Fed independence?
Well, if they can fire the Fed chair for overspending on a building project, then you know that any time a president has a disagreement with the Fed chair in the future, he can just come up with something and say, “oh, this is the real cause,” and fire him for that.
And that will effectively undermine the Fed’s independence. So Trump in a hard hat is really not about a renovation. This is really about whether the Fed can be independent in setting monetary policy. Don’t be fooled.
Graphic Truth: Japan’s ruling coalition loses majority
Japan’s ruling coalition lost control of the upper house in Sunday’s election, further weakening Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba amid growing domestic pressure and international challenges. To retain its majority, the Liberal Democratic Party and its partner Komeito needed to win 50 seats – they got only 47. This follows the LDP’s worst electoral showing in 15 years in last fall’s Lower House election. Rising inflation and opposition calls for tax cuts resonated with voters, while the far-right Sanseito party gained ground with a nationalist, anti-immigration platform. Despite the setback, Ishiba vowed to stay on, stressing the importance of upcoming US trade talks as Japan faces an August tariff deadline. For a refresher on why Shigeru was in such trouble to begin with, see here.
June 2025 inflation rate.
Graphic Truth: Inflation accelerates in June
Inflation ticked up to 2.7% in June as the effects of tariffs took hold, potentially complicating Donald Trump’s economic playbook. Consumer prices rose 0.3% since May, fueled by higher gas and apparel costs. Core inflation – which is seen as more reliable because it discounts volatile food and energy prices – also edged up to 2.9% year-over-year. With new tariffs looming Aug. 1, policymakers are bracing for more turbulence.