excited over a continued average up-grade of ⅕ of 1% per month, we may partially understand some of the Russian economic unrest with an uphill movement more than twenty times as steep and probably still steeper under Bolshevism.
As yet the evidence is not all in, but the index number of wholesale prices of our Bureau of Labor rose 106% between 1914 before the war and November, 1918, the month of the armistice, while the index number of the London Statist rose 122%.
Retail prices of food rose in the United States in the same period 79%, in England 133%, in France approximately 140%, etc. It is fair to say that the war doubled prices in the United States and Canada and more than trebled them in western Europe,[1] while in Russia it multiplied them by ten or twenty or more. The result is that the problem of the price level is, throughout the world, perhaps the greatest economic problem which the war has left.
The general level of prices in the United States is now almost threefold the level of 1896. Expressing the same fact in terms of the purchasing power of money, our dollar of to-day is worth only thirty-five cents of the money of 1896. In modern slang we may say almost literally, that, as compared with the biggest dollar we ever had, that of 1896, our present dollar "looks like thirty cents."
- ↑ From the fragmentary data available for Germany, it would seem that the official retail prices of food rose about two and one half-fold during the war and unofficial, i.e. illicit or "unter der Hand," prices rose about tenfold.
