Joe Biden Says US Inflation Is Among Lowest in the World: Is He Right?

In the summer of 2022 inflation soared to about 9 percent in the United States, the highest level in four decades. The development prompted the Federal Reserve to institute aggressive tightening of financial conditions, raising rates that pushed up borrowing costs to control a rise in prices.

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) has slowed as a result and came in at 3.2 percent in February. This was a tad higher than the prior month's reading but is substantially down from the peak of June 2022.

President Joe Biden has suggested this substantially better compared to other countries.

"Right now, America's inflation rate is among the lowest in the world," he noted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

The question is, is he correct? Newsweek took a look at how the CPI number in the U.S. stacks up against inflation readings among top global economies in the world.

Examining inflation data from around the world, the U.S. does appear to have one of the lowest inflation readings compared with other countries, according to figures by Trading Economics.

We also looked compared the American inflation rate with some of the top economies in the world.

The world's second-largest economy, China, saw price increases of about 0.7 percent in February, after they decelerated by 0.8 percent the previous month, according to data from Trading Economics. Meanwhile Japan, the world's third-biggest economy, recorded inflation of 2.2 percent in January.

Elsewhere, in Germany the inflation rate hit 2.5 percent while India—the fifth largest economy—saw inflation at a little over 5 percent in February. The United Kingdom's latest data, which came in January, put inflation at 4 percent and France's reading was at 3 percent for February. Russia reported 7.7 inflation for February and Canada was at 2.9 percent for January, while Italy had 0.75 percent, rounding up the readings for the world's top 10 economies.

Michael Pearce, a deputy chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, suggested that compared to G7 economies, inflation is about average in the United States.

"Among the major G7 economies, the current U.S. CPI inflation rate is middle of the pack," he told Newsweek. "Comparing the level of prices now to pre-pandemic (February 2020)—the U.S. has seen prices rise by more than almost every other major economy, with the exception of the U.K."

The U.S. percent change in inflation rate on a yearly basis since before COVID hit was 19.5 percent, according to Pearce, while the U.K. was at 20 percent as of January 2024.

There are countries that have seen intractable challenges with prices. In Argentina for example, one of top economies in Latin America, inflation in February came in more at than 276 percent on a yearly basis, according to Trading Economics. On a monthly basis it showed that it registered at 13.2, a slowdown from the previous month's 20.6 percent.

Update 3/18/24, 1:15 p.m. ET: This article was updated with a new chart and more context.