A Word About the Current Chaos in Prices and Inflation
Some prices collapsed, others skyrocketed, and the Consumer Price Index went haywire. Here’s what I’m seeing beyond the near term — and it’s not “deflation.”
Amid soaring prices of meat, beverages, fruit, veggies, and other food at home, and surging costs of personal goods, medical care services, and household furnishings, and amid a collapse in prices of gasoline, car rentals, public transportation, car insurance, lodging away from home, and other things – amid these diametrically opposed price movements, the Consumer Price Index went, as expected, haywire today. And we’re going to look at some of those gyrations beyond it.
First, here’s what got buffeted around:
The overall Consumer Price Index fell 0.8% in April from March, the steepest one-month drop since December 2008, when the economy was going through peak-Financial-Crisis 1. This brought the increase over the past 12 months down to 0.3%, the lowest since October 2015 during the oil bust at the time.
The “core” CPI – CPI without the volatile food components and the extremely volatile energy components – dropped 0.5% from March to April but was still up 1.4% from a year ago.
But wait…
What if we take out the most chaotic and largely temporary price movements at both ends to get to what the undying loss of the purchasing power of the dollar might be? Because that’s what consumer price inflation is.
There is a consumer price index that is not buffeted around by the month-to-month collapse of some prices and surge in other prices; The Cleveland Fed’s “Median CPI,” which is based on the data from the CPI, removes the extremes at both ends since these extremes are often temporary and distort long-term inflation trends.
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