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Sources: Yahoo! Finance; MarketWatch; djindexes.com; U.S. Treasury; London Bullion Market Association.
Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Indices are unmanaged and cannot be invested into directly. N/A means not applicable.
COZZIE LIVS. In 2023, Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year was “cozzie livs”, which the dictionary defines as “the average retail prices of food, clothing, and other necessities paid by a person, family, etc., in order to live at their usual standard,” reported Hanan Dervisevic of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation News.
It’s slang for the cost of living.
Like much of the world, Australia is experiencing a cost-of-living crisis. People have been squeezed by higher prices since 2022 when global inflation was 8.7 percent. Inflation is moving lower. It fell to 6.8 percent in 2023, according to the World Economic Outlook. That’s still well above the inflation rate targets of many central banks.
In the United States, we’ve fared slightly better. Prices rose 6.5 percent in 2022, and 3.4 percent in 2023.
Lower inflation may explain why New York City dropped lower on the list of the world’s most expensive cities. Every year, The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) conducts a Worldwide Cost of Living survey. In 2023, the most expensive cities in the world – tied for first – were Singapore, Malaysia, and Zurich, Switzerland.
In Singapore, “The cost of a certificate needed to own a car (which the government wants to discourage) recently topped $106,000, reported The Economist.
“The three biggest climbers were Santiago de Querétaro and Aguascalientes in Mexico, and Costa Rica’s capital, San José. Beijing was one of four Chinese cities among the ten biggest decliners in the ranking. That reflects the depreciation of the renminbi and the faltering of China’s recovery from the pandemic. Moscow and St. Petersburg fell furthest, plummeting by 105 places to 142nd and by 74 places to 147th, respectively,” reported The Economist.
The global cost of living could remain relatively high if the Israel-Hamas war spreads in the Middle East and energy prices rise. However, Oxford Economics forecast that global food prices will fall in 2024 as bumper harvests produce abundant supplies of many crops, reported Lee Ying Shan of CNBC.
Weekly Focus – Think About It
“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”
—Henry David Thoreau, naturalist
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