Global Finance, Explainedfor Everyone, Everywhere

Current Affair is an independent finance and news publication that explains world markets, personal finance, technology and public benefit programmes in plain English. It pairs daily reporting with free tools — live commodity prices, 600+ financial calculators and AI assistants — so a reader anywhere can check a number, understand what it means and act on it.

Gold and silver trade continuously on global markets and are benchmarked against the LBMA London price and COMEX futures. Your local retail rate is that international spot price converted into your currency, then adjusted for import duty, refining, taxes and dealer margin. That is why the same metal costs a different amount in Mumbai, Dubai, London and New York on the very same day.

Brent is light, sweet crude from the North Sea and sets the reference price for roughly two-thirds of the world's traded oil. WTI (West Texas Intermediate) is slightly lighter and priced at Cushing, Oklahoma, so it mainly reflects United States supply. The gap between them, called the Brent-WTI spread, widens when US inventories build or when freight and shipping costs rise.

Inflation measures how fast prices rise, usually through a consumer price index such as CPI or CPI-W. If prices climb 4% in a year while your savings earn 3%, your real return is about minus 1%: the balance grew, but it buys less. Judging a return against the current inflation rate, rather than against zero, is the only honest way to see whether money is really growing.

A cost-of-living adjustment raises a payment in line with measured inflation. The United States Social Security COLA, for example, compares the average CPI-W for July, August and September with the same quarter of the previous year and rounds the result to one decimal place. Pensions, salaries and benefit systems in other countries follow the same principle using their own local index.

Every article is written and signed by a named editor and traced back to primary sources: central bank releases, government departments, market regulators, exchange data and company filings. Figures carry the date they were published, pages are revised when official guidance changes, and nothing on the site is personalised financial advice.

Use a compound interest or lumpsum calculator for a one-time investment, a SIP calculator for monthly investing, CAGR to measure the past growth of a single holding, and XIRR when money went in and out on irregular dates. For borrowing, run an EMI or mortgage calculator first so you can see the total interest before you sign anything.

Yes. Every calculator and AI tool on Current Affair is free, needs no account and runs instantly in your browser. That includes SIP, lumpsum, compound interest, CAGR and XIRR calculators, loan and mortgage EMI planners, retirement and savings tools, and Islamic finance calculators such as Murabaha and halal mortgage.