Haritha Reddy wants to know why the price of tomatoes tripled in three days in the markets of central Uttar Pradesh recently. Aditya Rao thinks it's “downright ridiculous” that traders are asking more than 50 rupees ($1.10, £0.72, €0.80) for a kilo of sugar and about a hundred for a kilo of tuvar dal, a kind of split pea.
As the rest of the world worries about economic growth, or the lack of it, angry complaints from consumers like these Indian bloggers have turned Asian policymakers' minds to a different problem: rapidly rising inflation.
In many countries, the inflation genie is leaping out of the bottle at Olympic speed, generating the biggest swings in year-on-year consumer price indices in the region since the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis.
India, where prices were flat in mid-2009, this week reported a year-on-year rise in its wholesale prices index, the most watched measure, to 9.89 per cent from 8.6 per cent the previous month.
China said last week consumer prices there jumped to a 16-month high of 2.7 per cent in February, up from 1.5 per cent in January and uncomfortably close to the 3 per cent target set by Wen Jiabao, the premier, a week earlier.
Vietnam's inflation has more than doubled to 8.5 per cent in seven months, the Philippines is at 4.2 per cent, having been flat in mid-2009, and South Korea is bumping up against its central bank's 3 per cent inflation target.
The pressure comes from a variety of sources. Robert Prior-Wandesforde, HSBC Asia economist in Singapore, says India's inflation index is driven by food and oil prices, while Australian inflation, at 2.1 per cent, is driven mainly by red-hot demand from China for commodities.
Behind such rises is the speed and breadth of the recovery generated by three successive quarters of double-digit, quarter-on-quarter annualised growth in gross domestic product in most of Asia outside Japan. That may turn out to be four when reports for the current quarter begin to emerge next month.
Economic output is on average 4 per cent above the previous peak in the third quarter of 2008, with all the main economies back to pre-crisis levels except for trade-dependent Singapore, where a small gap remains to be made up.
The bounce has occurred in spite of continuing low demand for Asian exports in the US, the European Union and Japan, suggesting that Asian consumer spending has played a much bigger part than forecast. According to DBS, the Singapore bank, private sector consumption is 7 per cent higher than pre-crisis levels in the 10 largest Asian economies excluding Japan.
Even more significant, stripping out the direct effects of government spending makes little difference to the growth in GDP.
“Everyone says Asia doesn't consume enough. Well, no disrespect, but everyone is wrong,” says David Carbon, DBS head of economic research.
“Where else in the world has consumption grown by 7 per cent over the past 5 quarters? US consumption is flat on the horizon. Same for Europe and Japan.”
Most economists expect GDP growth to moderate to an average of about 6.5 per cent for the year as manufacturers push up against capacity limits, again stimulating inflation and pushing central banks to tighten monetary policy.
So far, only Australia, Malaysia and Vietnam have raised interest rates since the crisis, with the Chinese and Indian central banks relying on raising bank reserves requirements to tighten policy.
However, that is expected to change quickly, with the region's two biggest economies forecast to begin normalising rates in the second quarter, together with South Korea.
Frederic Neumann, Asia economist at HSBC in Hong Kong, is forecasting that policy rates will be between 50 and 100 basis points higher in most countries by the end of the year, with Indonesia raising by 125bp, Pakistan 350bp and Vietnam 400bp.
