About this project

What this amount really worth ? That's the simple question this project wants to answer.

News and political speeches contain a lot of big amounts but such numbers are not easily understandable by themselves.
Are you be able to represent yourself what really are 5 billion US Dollars?

We created this tool to compare such big amounts, we called these amounts the stories.

Stories

A story, in our application, represents a spending. It can be all kind of spending, like public budget, construction costs etc..

Story types

We identified two different kinds of stories, the unique events and the repeatable events. Unique events are spending that are set for a particular event such as the construction cost for a building. They're not meant to be repeated in the time, when the building is constructed the story ends here. These unique events can be compared to an amount thanks to a percentage. Therefor we can say: this amount is X percent of this story.

Repeatable events are events repeatable over the years. The annual government's budgets are a good example of repeatable events.

Every spending must be describe with 2 major information:

• the currency used
• the amount of the spending

Story description

Every story must also have the following informations

• one title,
• one description
• and one source URL.

Such informations are really helpful to understand a particular spending event. Therefor we can answer the "What is it?", "Where does it come from?" questions.

Stories & inflation

Story Attributes

name	Description	Example
value	The value of the spending, it's the amount of the spending.	11,000,000
currency	Story's currency	UK Pound (GBP)
title	The story title	Consultancy on Cardiff Airport buyout
description	A short description of our story	Consultancy work surrounding the purchase, including valuation, totalled more than £912,00 and with VAT that figure rose to £1.1m.
country	The country (or zone) of the story	France (FRA)
source	The story's source URL.
type
status
sticky
year
themes

The autor of a story give us the following informations:

"value":                 100e6,
"year":                  2010,
"country":               "FRA",
"currency":              "EUR",

We need to complete its story in calculating and saving the following informations:

"inflation_last_year":? 
"value_current": ?,
"value_usd_current":?,

###1. Fill the field inflation_last_year The inflation is calculated using the Python module economics. inflation_last_year is the last year for which we can compute the inflation. It depends of the data given by https://github.com/datasets/cpi

###2. Fill the field value_current The field "value_current" is calculated using the inflation from the year of the story and the reference value "inflation_last_year".

How many "currency"(EUR) would I need in "inflation_last_year"(2012) to pay for what cost "value"(100e6) in "year"(2010)?

inflation.inflate(100e6, datetime.date(2012,1,1), datetime.date(2010,1,1), 'France')

   # Response: `112871266.26 EUR`

###3. Fill the field value_usd_current The USD is our reference currency for comparison, so we need to convert the "value_current" into an USD currency.

To do that we can request our Rates API like so:

http GET /api/rates/EUR HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/text; charset=utf-8

   #Response: `1.3247` 

So now we can convert the value into dollars:

coffeescript exchange_rate = response
user_amount_usd = exchange_rate * value_current 
1.3247 * 112871266.26 = 149520744.509

   # Response: `1.149520744.509 USD` 

###3. Final Result

"value":                 100e6,
"year":                  2005,
"country":               "FRA",
"currency":              "EUR",
"value_current":         112871266.26,
"value_usd_current":     149520744.509,
"year":                  2010,
"inflation_last_year":   2012,

Inflation