For October 2021, the US inflation rate was at 6.2%, while in the UK it was 4.2%. That’s the highest rate the US has seen since the end of 1990, while the UK last saw inflation that high back in December 2011, nearly a decade ago.

These two countries are not alone. Amongst the G20 countries, Argentina reported a staggering inflation rate of 52.1% for October 2021. In Turkey it was 19.58%, while Brazil, Russia, and Mexico all reported higher numbers than the US. There are growing concerns about Japan and China too.

In other words, rising inflation is going to affect a huge portion of the planet as prices rise for hundreds of millions of people. With fuel prices up and global supply chain issues playing a part, individual governments face a hard task in bringing inflation under control.

Unsurprisingly, this has got a lot of people talking about the issue.

Just last week we found 231k authors mentioning inflation online, a dramatic surge on the week prior, let alone compared to the years preceding 2021. Based on current data, we can expect this week’s volume to be at a similar level.

It’s clear that rising inflation hasn’t come as a surprise. Inflation discussion has been, uhm, inflating since the beginning of 2021. Many big topics such as supply chains, prices, and wages have been at the fore.

We’ll avoid making claims about inflation and economics, but one big inflation-related concern is around people’s savings. If the interest rate on said savings is lower than inflation, technically they’re losing their value.

This can cause people to do lots of things, but one is to look into alternative ways of using this money to ‘hedge’ inflation. A classic example of this is people putting their money into gold in the belief that it will hold its value.

But this is a new world where it often feels like things have been turned upside down. Are people considering other options? We had a look.

One of the biggest topics in the whole inflation conversation this year has been Bitcoin, which, without including mentions of cryptocurrencies in general, would still have topped our table.

It is not hard at all to find tweets claiming investing in cryptocurrency is a way to stay ahead of inflation, though this is of course only a claim. Cryptocurrency values can fluctuate wildly, even at the drop of a tweet.

Gold still had some popularity, but interestingly NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, have received their fair share of attention too. If you’re not sure what an NFT is, this explainer does a good job of shining some light on the topic.

If inflation continues to rise around the world, we could see interest in cryptocurrency and other investment options rise with it.

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The Brandwatch React team