MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Indec says Argentina's inflation in October stood at 2.7%

Inflation is a battle won, Caputo stressed

Argentina's National Institute of Statistics and Census (Indec) Tuesday announced that the Consumer Price Index (CPI) went up 2.7% in October, which represented a significant slowdown from previous months despite an interannual 193% increase and 107% in 2024 alone. October's inflation was the lowest figure in almost three years. In November 2021, it stood at 2.5%. September's inflation was 3.5%.

The division with the highest increase in October was Housing, Water, Electricity, Gas, and Other Fuels (5.4%), due to adjustments upwards in Rent and monthly house maintenance expenses. Other items going up above par were Clothing and Footwear (4.4%), and Restaurants and Hotels (4.3%) in the Greater Buenos Aires area. The two divisions that registered the lowest variations in October 2024 were Transportation (1.2%) and Food and Non-Alcoholic Beverages (1.2%).

Although the CPI nationwide went up 2.7% in October, core inflation, which excludes regulated and seasonal components, rose 2.9%, the lowest since September 2020,

Economy Minister Luis Toto Caputo said that inflation “is a battle that has been won.”

“There was talk that the disinflation process was going to be very slow and that then we were going to have to devaluate [the Argentine peso] in February or March,” he added during a speech at the Buenos Aires Stock Exchange. They said that inflation would not go below a certain level, Caputo argued. But “that level was easily broken.”

“Now we have practically converged to the crawl level plus international inflation,” he also pointed out. The minister added that “this is the most successful stabilization program ever seen, among other reasons, because today we have already recovered November's activity level,” he went on while insisting that “private salaries have already recovered November's level.” In addition, “we have also solved the fiscal problem, solved the quasi-fiscal problem, we have solved a large part of the Central Bank's balance sheet.”

“The credit level has doubled, we have achieved all this by recomposing relative prices, also in practically all the levels where prices were stepped on,” Caputo also pointed out. ”We are going to end (the year) with a fall in GDP that is going to be essentially 2% or 3%, which is nothing more than the statistical drag,” he also reckoned.