{"id":79,"date":"2007-06-12T12:52:35","date_gmt":"2007-06-12T11:52:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tinyplanetblog.com\/?p=79"},"modified":"2007-06-12T12:52:35","modified_gmt":"2007-06-12T11:52:35","slug":"the-power-of-pork","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/tinyplanetblog.com\/?p=79","title":{"rendered":"The power of pork"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Soaring pork prices are fueling <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ft.com\/cms\/s\/f1adef7e-1892-11dc-b736-000b5df10621,dwp_uuid=9c33700c-4c86-11da-89df-0000779e2340.html\" target=\"_blank\">Chinese inflation<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The cost is up 40% in the last year (while meat prices generally are up 26.5%), largely because of a blue-ear disease epidemic which has seen at least 18,000 pigs slaughtered. With pork a staple of the Chinese diet, and farmers no longer rearing the animals for fear of the illness, the shortages are having a knock-on effect.<\/p>\n<p>Food prices in general are up about 8.3%, although consumer prices as a whole rose 3.4% in May. The government&#8217;s target is 3%, and so another interest rate hike is on the cards as the authorities try to cool an 11% annual economic growth rate.<\/p>\n<p>And <strong>Reuters\/Financial Times<\/strong> make an interesting observation:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Savers earn 3.06 percent on 12-month certificates of deposit, meaning that after a 20 percent tax is deducted, the value of their money is failing to keep pace with inflation.<\/p>\n<p>This has encouraged millions of Chinese to cash in their deposits and punt on the stock market, which jangled government nerves by falling sharply last month after almost quadrupling in 2 years.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Communist in name only.<\/p>\n<p>Inflation is a tricky bugger to quantify as different countries use different products in their calculations. For instance, Ireland is the only country that I know of in Europe which includes mortgage payments in its figures. This means the Irish inflation rate is above 5%, whereas if mortgage payments were stripped out it would be closer to 2.7% (the eurozone target is just under 2%).<\/p>\n<p>Nonetheless, headline figures spook investors and jittery investors can instigate sell-offs that wipe billions off a stock market in just a few hours. It seems that, as with so much in life, confidence is everything.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Soaring pork prices are fueling Chinese inflation. The cost is up 40% in the last year (while meat prices generally are up 26.5%), largely because of a blue-ear disease epidemic which has seen at least 18,000 pigs slaughtered. With pork a staple of the Chinese diet, and farmers no longer rearing the animals for fear [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[25,29,59],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/tinyplanetblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/tinyplanetblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/tinyplanetblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tinyplanetblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tinyplanetblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=79"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/tinyplanetblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/tinyplanetblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=79"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tinyplanetblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=79"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tinyplanetblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=79"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}