Thursday, June 11, 2009

Search Trends Reveal Growing Concerns Over Hyperinflation

During the last quarter of 2008, the near collapse of the US banking system prompted by some accounts of institutional or electronic bank runs paved way for the predominant concern of deflation.

The one year search trend in Google Trends reflected this (see below). Now with surging stock markets and turbocharged commodity prices, the pendulum has apparently shifted from deflation to the other extreme end-hyperinflation.

Deflation searches have been on a decline while searches for hyperinflation has been on the rise (see below).
As of this writing, deflation still dominates with 6.58 million articles against 2.5 million for hyperinflation. Meanwhile, inflation has 67.5 million articles while stagflation has 735,000 articles.

So there seems less interest on the middleground.

The point is we seem to be at the crux of a trend transition where public concerns appear to weigh on hyperinflation.

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