Inflation: Definition and additional resources from BNET
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BNET Business Dictionary

Business Definition for: Inflation

  • a sustained increase in a country's general level of prices that devalues its currency, often caused by excess demand in the economy

Wiktionary Definition for: Inflation

  • #An act, instance of, or state of expansion or increase in size, especially by injection of a gas.
  • Ex: ''The '''inflation''' of the balloon took five hours.''
  • Expansion in the money supply beyond the increase in available goods and services. Often misunderstood to mean a rise in prices, which generally accompanies such an expansion.
  • Ex: ''The low level of the Federal Reserve Rate caused a great '''inflation''' in the money supply that year, accompanied soon after by a general rise in prices.''

Additional Resources

Inflation And Its Impact On Investments
"Understanding inflation is crucial to investing because inflation can reduce the value of investment returns. Inflation affects all aspects of the economy, from consumer spending, business investment, and employment rates, to government programs, tax policies, and interest rates. This article explains the basics: What is Inflation? What Causes Inflation?...
Tags: Finance, Currency & Foreign Exchange, Inflation, Investment
White papers 2003-07-01
Inflation, Volatility, and Growth
This paper re-examines the relationship between inflation, inflation volatility and growth using cross-country panel data for the past 30 years. To examine the role of inflation uncertainty on growth, intra-year inflation data to construct an annual measure of inflation volatility is used. Using this measure, it is found that inflation...
Tags: Finance, Currency & Foreign Exchange, Inflation, Volatility
White papers 1996-01-05
Inflation-Linked Bonds
An inflation-linked bond is a bond that provides protection against inflation. Most inflation-linked bonds, the Canadian "Real Return Bond "RRB and the new U.S. Treasury inflation-protected security IPS are principal indexed. This means their principal is increased by the change in inflation over a period. In most countries, the Consumer...
Tags: Inflation, Bond, Finance, Currency & Foreign Exchange
White papers
Has the Inflation Process Changed?
Low inflation has been a fact of economic life in many countries now for at least a decade. If inflation persistence has declined, why has it occurred? This paper addresses this question by studying the univariate inflation process in a number of countries. It helps to identify if changes in...
Tags: Finance, Currency & Foreign Exchange, Inflation
White papers 2005-11-01
Does Inflation Uncertainty Vary with the Level of Inflation?
The purpose of this study is to test the hypothesis that inflation uncertainty increases at higher levels of inflation. Our analysis is based on the generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity GARCH class of models, which allow the conditional variance of the error term to be time-varying. Since this variance is a...
Tags: Currency & Foreign Exchange, Finance, Inflation Uncertainty, Inflation
White papers 1996-08-01
On Target? The International Experience With Achieving Inflation Targets
This paper examines the international experience with full-fledged inflation targeting monetary regimes. Stylized facts are brought together from a review of the institutional elements of inflation targeting frameworks, a comparison of actual and targeted inflation outcomes, and case studies of large inflation target misses. Inflation targets are missed about 40...
Tags: Currency & Foreign Exchange, Inflation, Finance
White papers 2005-08-01
Consumer Prices Drop in Southern California.(Originated from The Orange County Register, Calif.)
Jul. 17--Inflation? What inflation? Jul. 17--Inflation? What inflation?
Tags: inflation, Orange PCS
Research articles 1996-07-17
The Forgotten Problem of Inflation
When was the last time one accounted for inflation when researching a company's financial statements? Believe it or not, inflation can fool even the most sophisticated investors. That is why it is important, when analyzing a company, that one understands how inflation affects the figures presented in a company's financial...
Tags: Finance, Currency & Foreign Exchange, Inflation, Investopedia, Financial, Financial Accounting
White papers 2001-02-14
The Inflation Of The 1970's
But it is not enough to explain the inflation of the 1970s to say that the U.S. economy had bad luck during the 1970s, that the political consensus to support a policy of inflation reduction did not exist until the very end of the 1970s, and that economic policy makers...
Tags: Inflation, Finance, Currency & Foreign Exchange
White papers 1998-06-26
Modeling Inflation in Georgia
The paper explains the behavior of inflation in Georgia in the post-stabilization period. A long-run equation linking prices to money and the exchange rate, as well as a short-run, dynamic equation for inflation are estimated. The inflation equation is stable, points to a dominant role of the exchange rate in...
Tags: Modeling, Equation, Finance, Currency & Foreign Exchange, Inflation Equation, Inflation, Georgia
White papers 2003-11-01
Inflation Expectations and the Transmission of Monetary Policy
This paper discusses an explaination for the costliness of reducing inflation in that inflation expectations are less than perfectly rational. To explore this possibility, the estimate the degree of non-rationality implicit in two survey measures of inflation expectations are derived. It is also found that a structural New Keynesian model...
Tags: Finance, Inflation, Currency & Foreign Exchange, Survey
White papers 1998-01-11
Inflation digs in; the OECD's new economic forecasts say that the past year's tightening of monetary policy around the world will do no more than hold inflation steady. (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) (Business)
Inflation digs in Inflation digs in
Tags: inflation, OECD
Research articles 1989-07-01
Changes in the Inflation Process in Canada
The Canadian economy is currently in transition from a period of disinflation to one with a very low and relatively stable inflation rate. Against this background, the author asks whether reduced-form parameters should be expected to be invariant to changes in the inflation process. It also explains two empirical issues....
Tags: Finance, Currency & Foreign Exchange, Inflation, Economy
White papers 1995-01-01
Empirical Investigations of Inflation Targeting
This paper empirically investigates issues associated with inflation targeting using a dataset of 66 countries for the 1980 - 2000 periods. The paper focuses on two issues. First, which factors are systematically associated with a country's decision to adopt inflation targeting as its monetary framework? Second, does inflation targeting improve...
Tags: Finance, Currency & Foreign Exchange, Inflation
White papers 2003-07-01
Inflation and the Size of Government
Inflation is significantly positively related to the size of government mainly when periods of war and peace are compared. The paper discusses that a weak positive peacetime time-series correlation between inflation and the size of government and a negative cross-country correlation of inflation with non-defense spending. Read on for more...
Tags: Software, Finance, Vertical Industries, Government, Currency & Foreign Exchange, Enterprise Software, Inflation
White papers 2003-01-01
Inflation - Houghton Mifflin
Inflation is a sustained rise in the average level of prices. Inflation causes a decrease in the purchasing power of a country’s currency. By decreasing the purchasing power of money, inflation has what economists call redistributive effects. During periods of inflation, people who are on fixed incomes, such as...
Tags: Inflation, Currency & Foreign Exchange, Finance
White papers 2000-11-18
Treasury Inflation-Indexed Debt: A Review of the U.S. Experience
This paper reviews the U.S. experience with inflation-indexed debt. To date, Treasury inflation-indexed securities have not been highly valued by investors, with the spread between the yields on nominal and inflation-indexed securities falling consistently below most measures of long-run inflation expectations. By purchasing inflation-indexed securities, investors could lock in a...
Tags: Inflation, Federal Reserve Board, Security, Currency & Foreign Exchange, Finance
White papers 2002-01-07
Why Core Inflation?
Mark Thoma submits: There is a lot of confusion over the Fed's use of core inflation as part of its policy making process. One reason for confusion is that we are using a single measure to summarize three different definitions of the term "core inflation" based upon how it...
Tags: US Market
External links 2008-08-28
Peak Theory, Applied To Inflation
James Picerno submits: We've been chatting up the inflation story lately, and for good reason: inflation is rising. But that's yesterday's news. Thus the relevant question: Will it continue to rise? No one really knows, although everyone has a guess, and those guesses are all over the...
Tags: US Market
External links 2008-08-22
What is the Real Definition of Inflation?
This article defines the refined definition of inflation like "inflation" after "the act of inflating or the condition of being inflated" is: "An increase in the amount of currency in circulation, resulting in a relatively sharp and sudden fall in its value and rise in prices: it may...
Tags: Currency & Foreign Exchange, Finance, Increase, Inflation
White papers 2003-09-15
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