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Comment by TiccyRobby | Hacker News Reader

The %73 is the official number, which is absurdly obscured. This research group is more accurate: https://enagrup.org/?hl=en which states that the yearly inflation is %160.

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This may be a stupid question, but how is any value above 100% possible?

Inflation is "measured" by tracking the price increase of some representative items like food staples or fuel. Prices of course are free to increase much more than 100%.

Some product basket costs $1 at the beginning of the year. At 100% inflation, at the end of the year it will cost $2. At 200%, it will cost $3, and so on.

If a banana goes from costing $10 to costing $26, that's a $16, or 160%, rise in price.

Inflation is measured in price increases. So 100% inflation means the price increased by 100%, i.e. prices doubled.

If something costs $1 yesterday but costs $2.50 today that is an increase of 150%. How inflation is tracked differs from country to country but typically it's based on looking at the prices for goods the average citizen might buy and tracking the price increases/decreases from year to year.

It’s the increase per year. Prices can go up, say 5x in a year, which would be 500%. Sometimes inflation hits millions of percent.

That would be 400%.

Correct, yes, off by 1 (00%)

You may be confusing percentage increases (bounded by nothing) with percentage decreases (which are often bounded at 100%). Though even decreases aren't actually bounded either -- like when the price of crude oil turned negative at the start of COVID, that resulted in oil experiencing a >100% decrease in cost.

At the end of the day it's all just multiplication, and you can multiply by any number.

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