Economic crises are brewing in a number of countries like Brazil, India, Indonesia, Iran, South Africa, Turkey, and Ukraine. They are all having trouble maintaining reasonable price levels on imports. Natural gas in Ukraine, for example, is one issue that has been pressing their civil society past its tipping-point. Because much of the private investment in these countries is denominated in foreign currency, devaluation doesn’t serve to unwind those investments and developing countries get both ends of a bad dynamic: a withdrawal of investment causes both local economic stagnation and wage-lagging inflation. For normal people it’s no different than deflation: their wages fall relative to the prices they pay for everything.

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