Stealth inflation is a type of charges or fees created by businesses to gain extra profit and revenue from its customers. The stealth part of the term is that business will often use miscellaneous fees to charge customers without the customers even knowing the fees existed as they were hidden in the fine print of a signed a contract. The inflation part of the term relates to the up charging of the service without actually providing anything additional. Since most companies charge a fee to accept payment, a portion gets built into profit and revenue. A big example of stealth inflation can be overdraft fees from banks surcharges from Telco providers, processing fees and installation fees. Another from of stealth inflation is devaluation of money by a government, sometimes in order to pay off debt with lower value currency. The unintended higher cost of imported goods and raw material is passed on to the consumer yet not part of traditional definition of inflation.
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Famous quotes containing the word stealth:
“Our job is now clear. All Americans must be prepared to make, on a 24 hour schedule, every war weapon possible and the war factory line will use men and materials which will bring, the war effort to every man, woman, and child in America. All one hundred thirty million of us will be needed to answer the sunrise stealth of the Sabbath Day Assassins.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)