> It also didn’t just stop there. January saw a 20% inflation rate, meaning from the day we crossed the border from Uruguay to Argentina to the day we crossed the border back to Brazil, about a month later, prices were about 20% higher.
That’s not a 20% inflation rate. It’s a monthly amount.
"inflation rate" does not necessarily means annual rate, so it will depend on the context. For those that never lived through hyperinflation, they rarely see it discussed in terms of month-over-month comparison, but someone in Argentina, Venezuela or 80/90s Brazil would just assume that "20% inflation" means "monthly".
Unless otherwise specified, rates are assumed to be annualized. That’s standard for everything from mortgages to inflation as it allows for an apples to apples comparison.
My point with showing the annualized calculation was so that those of us in the rest of the world, the majority of people on this site, could better grasp the severity of the problem.
In the USA we’ve had about 20% inflation in consumer goods (or at least according to CPI) in the past three years and it’s been a hot topic. The Argentina numbers are staggering.
That’s not a 20% inflation rate. It’s a monthly amount.
That’s a 1.2^12 - 1 = 791.60% inflation rate.