Buenos Aires Herald 
Argentina’s economy ministry will begin publishing inflation figures every week, Economic Policy Secretary Gabriel Rubinstein announced on X (formerly Twitter) on Friday.
The numbers are separate from the INDEC statistics bureau’s figures, which are published just once a month.
The INDEC data published two days ago showed that monthly inflation hit 12.4% in August, the highest rate in 32 years.
“We will be issuing a weekly inflation report every Friday,” wrote Rubinstein, whose role is similar to that of vice economy minister.
Releasing the data on a weekly basis will make it easier to weed out the carry-over effects of inflation spikes in previous months, an official source told the Herald.
Inflation peaked at 4.8% in the week after the primary elections, a graph the Economic Policy Secretariat published on X showed. It has fallen each week since then, reaching 2.1% from September 4-10.
Far-right libertarian economist Javier Milei was the surprise winner of the August 13 presidential primaries, garnering more votes than either ruling bloc Unión por la Patria or opposition Juntos por el Cambio. Milei proposes extreme measures that are not backed by most economists, including dollarizing the country’s economy.
The day after the vote, the Central Bank devalued the peso by 22%. That brought the official dollar exchange rate to AR$350, a level it plans to maintain until 15 November. It also increased the interest rate by 21 percentage points.
The devaluation came at the behest of the International Monetary Fund, in the context of Argentina’s troubled deal with the international lender of last resort.
“Although the weekly figure remains very high, it is already far more in line with the values prior to the devaluation in the month of August,” the Secretariat wrote. “We estimate that the weekly inflation records will accentuate and consolidate their downward tendency in the next measurements.”
August’s figures brought inter-annual inflation to 124%, and total inflation for the first eight months of 2023 was 80%, according to Tuesday’s report.
