Even outside America, inflation is starting to look entrenched

INFLATION DOMINATES the American to an extent not seen since the 1980s, when prices were last rising at the current pace. Much like complaining about the weather or last night’s basketball play-offs, moaning about has become a conversation starter. According to figures published on May 11th, consumer prices rose by 8.3% in April, compared with the previous year. A day earlier, President Joe Biden called fighting inflation his “top domestic priority”. Newspapers are publishing four times as many stories mentioning inflation as they did a year ago; several polls suggest that Americans believe inflation is a bigger problem for their country than the war in Ukraine. But America is not alone. Inflation is also becoming baked into everyday life in other parts of the rich world.has gathered data on five indicators across ten big economies—”core” inflation, which excludes food and energy prices; the dispersion in inflation rates for the sub-components of the consumer-price index; labour costs; inflation expectations; and Google searches for inflation. To gauge where inflation has become most pervasive, we rank each country according to how it fares on each measure, and then combine these ranks to form an “inflation entrenchment” score.