Kenya's shilling has not moved in two years. Its biggest source of dollars is Kenyans abroad.

Posted on 27 October 2026

The Kenyan shilling has barely moved for more than two years: since July 2024 it has stayed between 128 and 131 to the US dollar. That calm is recent and unusual. The shilling lost more than a third of its value between 2020 and January 2024, touching about 163, and before that spent decades sliding from 7 to the dollar at independence to more than 100.

The biggest single source of the dollars behind it is not a crop or a beach. Kenyans abroad sent home about $5.1 billion in 2025, more than the country earned from any single export...

Is Portugal unaffordable? A housing problem, not a cost of living one

Posted on 27 October 2026

Ask people in Portugal and many will tell you the country has become unbearably expensive to live in. We looked at 25 years of public data to see whether that holds up. It does for one thing, housing. Buying a home now costs far more relative to pay than it did a decade ago, and a new rental in the municipalities of Lisbon and Cascais, the core of the Lisbon Metropolitan Area, costs more than a full-time minimum wage.

Whose money lost the most value? Prices since 2000 in 158 economies

Posted on 24 October 2026

Prices rise almost everywhere, but the speed varies enormously. Using the World Bank's consumer price index, we compared what a basket of goods cost in 2000 with what it cost in 2024 across 158 economies. In Japan it cost 11% more. In Angola it cost 355 times as much.

A saver in Sub-Saharan Africa faced about one and a half times the yearly erosion of one in Europe and Central Asia. Holding cash for two decades was a steady drag in Germany and close to a wipe-out in Angola or Iran.