Tonmoy Islam offers insights into inflation for Burlington Times-News article

The report by Elizabeth Pattman with the Times-News focused on the rising cost of living in Alamance County and how that's impacting residents.

A recent Burlington Times-News article focused on how inflation is impacting local residents includes insights from Assistant Professor of Economics Tonmoy Islam.

Photo of associate professor of economics Tonmoy Islam
Tonmoy Islam, associate professor of economics

The article by reporter Elizabeth Pattman drew from a recent study by Filterbuy that found that the cost of living in Alamance County rose nearly 13 percent between 2010 and 2020, with the county and country seeing even higher rates during the past year.

Islam noted that in response to higher rates of inflation, the Federal Reserve may act to increase interest rates with the goal of slowing down demand for goods and curbing spending.

“That (benchmark) interest rate is currently … really, really low,” Islam said. “So the Federal Reserve is planning to raise interest rates, three times I believe, in this year actually. That is done to cool down demand basically to reduce people’s spending and so we can expect then at least prices to come down by the end of this year.”

Read the entire article here.