NPR.

This is the indicator from Planet Money.

I'm Whalen Wong.

And I'm Adrian Ma.

Central banks around the world right now are taking actions to try to get inflation under

control.

Consumer prices are still high in a lot of places, including the US, where June CPI figures

just came out and the inflation number is 9.1% higher than a year ago.

That is even higher than was expected.

By now, you can probably rattle off all the different steps the Fed is taking to tame

inflation.

It's hiking interest rates and doing this thing called quantitative tightening, basically

offloading bonds to shrink the money supply.

Now a lot of times when we talk about inflation, we're only talking about how it affects us,

like here in the US.

But of course we live in a connected world, a world where what countries do with their

economies affects other countries.

And when a bunch of central banks around the world are doing what the Fed is doing to

try to fight high inflation, that can get the global economy into a situation with the

controversial, largely political name, a reverse, currency war.

Today on the show, we unpack this inflammatory terms to learn why the drumbeats of a reverse

currency war are getting louder.

...