Rice up 30%

in one day in Thailand. Up over 100% since Janruary. The Financial Times reports that the immediate cause was Egypt's ban on rice exports. Egypt is one of the world's leading exporters.

Let's take a look at Egypt's monetary policy for last year. This comes from the 2007 IMF Report.

Monetary policy was tightened once spillover effects of administered price increases became visible in late 2006. Policy interest rates were raised twice. The nominal exchange rate appreciated by 1.1 percent against the U.S. dollar in the year to end-June, with greater flexibility since then. In
conjunction with the partial sterilization of external inflows, broad money
growth was kept in the 13-15 percent range until April 2007, but subsequently surged to 18 percent as less of the inflows were sterilized and
money market funds deposited the proceeds from maturing central bank
certificates of deposit with commercial banks.

Hmmm.... "sterilization of inflows" sounds like bankerspeak for "let's rob the entire country of a money with strong purchasing value in order to keep profits high for exporters."

That's why they have inflation. The problem with juicing GDP by printing is that the resultant time-delayed drop in national wealth is usually bigger than the temporary add-on by juicing up GDP through "sterilization of inflows."