If you were so inclined, you could have spent accordingly, contributing to the overheating of the economy and the inevitable recession that followed.
If the prices of vegetables, fruit and other crops are more flexible than other prices, food inflation may be an early warning of an overheating economy.
But with robust jobs and housing figures sparking warnings of an overheating U.S. economy, many analysts believe it is only a matter of time before interest rates go up.
On Tuesday Dr. Yaga Venugopal Reddy, the governor of the Reserve Bank of India, set the alarm bells ringing when he warned that present rates of development risked overheating the economy.
Provided the election comes off cleanly, those changes have increased the chance that this year Mexico will avoid the economic or political crises that have marked the start of the past four presidential terms despite some signs of economic overheating, and worries about the possible impact of a slowing economy north of the border.
Thus a strong dollar is also in the interest of America's overheating economy right now as it is helping to keep down inflation.
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Since last year, the Chinese economy has shown signs of overheating due to the extensive government investment in infrastructure.
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With financial firms forecast to need another 15, 000 people in the next decade, the Edinburgh economy is in danger of overheating.
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The government line is that the economy is overheating only in this handful of sectors.
Many economists fear that the Chinese economy is in serious danger of overheating.
Paradoxically, if Mr Greenspan is right, and the economy is indeed in danger of overheating, the outlook for America's stockmarket is not so bad.
Loose monetary policy fuels inflation when the economy is overheating, not when it has lots of spare capacity, as now.
And China needs to allow its currency to move upwards, not just to help the rest of the world, but also to rebalance its own overheating economy.
With much of the world increasingly worried about inflation, questions arise about what an overheating Chinese economy could do to global prices.
On the contrary, with an overheating economy (the current-account deficit is likely to hit 9% of GDP this year) and almost half its trade conducted with Europe, Turkey looks vulnerable.
Not only does a fixed rate prevent a central bank from using interest rates to prevent an economy from overheating (because higher interest rates would push up the value of the currency), but it also encourages too much foreign-currency borrowing when foreign interest rates are lower than local ones.
Moreover, although there are signs of inflationary pressure in the labour market and the housing market, the economy does not seem to be overheating as it did in the late 1980s.
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