With each new headline, it can feel like we’re falling further into a quagmire of doom, and this week has been no exception. UK inflation rose in March to 3.3 per cent (up from February’s 3 per cent) because of the Iran war. Experts warn that April may be even worse and it means bills will rise yet again. It’s certainly not good news. But before completely catastrophising, it’s worth taking a step back. What I can offer is some perspective found in an unlikely place: Argentina.
Between 2023 and 2025, I lived in Buenos Aires. As I marked my first anniversary there in October 2024, the city was gearing up for its huge annual Pride parade. There was dancing in the streets (for Pride, rather than for me). A woman spun me into a merengue-style dance, as gloriously decorated floats pumped reggaeton music from massive speakers. As they coasted past grandiose buildings, it felt like Earth’s most abundant country.
It certainly was not. But locals may have been celebrating a welcome dip in inflation that month: it had dropped to 193 per cent, Argentina’s lowest rate in almost a year. In 2023, inflation there peaked at 211 per cent: the world’s highest. You read that correctly, it was 64 times the size of the UK’s current inflation. Before travelling to South America, I had no idea what it meant to live in a country with such a high rate of inflation, or how Argentinians managed it. I sometimes still marvel that they did at all.
Nobody printed menus. There wasn’t any point when prices changed daily, sometimes hourly. All prices were on QR codes or rewritten in chalk on the cloudy backdrop of a much-scrubbed blackboard. I’d see dog walkers with 12 dogs on one mega-lead; they took on more dogs rather than raise their prices in line with inflation.
My rent, in Argentine pesos, resembled a paper Jenga tower. Ironically, my landlady wouldn’t accept pesos because they devalued too rapidly. I could only pay in prized, stable US dollars. Immediately after queuing to get them from a Western Union linked to my British account – nobody used the city’s rare ATMs; you lost too much money – I had to find a cueva, a black market exchange house. At first, I’d go to the pedestrianised Florida Street, where dodgy characters whispered “Cambio? Cambio? Cambio?” The change they gave you, usually in the tiny backroom of a street florist, was, technically, illegal. But everyone did it. Eventually, I got my own cueva. He’d arrive on a motorbike, look left then right, then signal me up to my flat where we’d do the dollar deal.
In return for my paper tower, I’d get just five USD$100 notes. My rent started at $430 in 2023. In the coming weeks, it rose to $460, then $500, then $550, then $600, before I paid my estate agent a “fee” to fix it from escalating further. Admittedly, most inflation was on already low prices; a cab across town cost a couple of quid when I first arrived. Wages grew at a comparable clip to inflation, but the steep increases made everyday financial decisions unpredictable for locals. As poverty rose to 50 per cent, I saw young kids waiting outside giant garbage containers as their parents climbed inside to bin-dive.
Argentines reacted in two ways to such pressure, both of which are instructive for the UK today. The first is a warning. In December 2023, two months after my arrival, Argentina elected Javier Milei, the radical right-wing populist president (and Trump’s lapdog). The danger of creeping inflation is that people look for extreme solutions and extreme representation.
The second is perspective. As panic about UK inflation "soaring" may leave you crying into your cornflakes, know this about the Argentinians. They’ve lived with the world’s highest inflation for decades, and the ones I met in Buenos Aires, whilst struggling financially, still chose resilience and hedonism over weariness. Inflation didn’t stop them from living their lives, even when they had to compromise. They’d always find a few pesos left over to make merry and get ready to meringue.
