It appears they’ve got a little inflation trouble in Argentina and news reports such as this one at the Christian Science Monitor indicate the government has decided to wield “the sledgehammer of economic policy tools”, also known as price controls, in an attempt to combat the problem.
Official inflation is just over 10 percent, however, as indicated below via data from The Economist, that number is believed to be less than half the actual inflation rate that is even worse than in Venezuela.
Of course, the problem with price controls is that … they don’t work. They attack the symptom of a problem rather than the problem itself which, as is usually case, is a rapidly rising money supply.
This particular effort will freeze all supermarket prices until April 1st and will no doubt lead to shortages and a growing black market for all sorts of everyday items.