It's already well above 3%, if you could include the stock market in the metric.
That's the problem facing Yellen: not just doing enough, but doing something that won't just end up inflating the kinds of assets owned by the wealthy. Consumer prices have been stable because despite the increase in money supply, consumers as a whole were treading water (at best) even before the pandemic.
She would be happy to do something that caused CPI to get above 3%. It would mean the Fed could finally take the punch bowl away. They've been refilling it for well north of a decade, and it drains as fast as they fill.
Why does it make a mockery? It’s included in CPI and for a large swath of America housing isn’t growing by 10% each year, so we’d expect housing inflation to be moderate on average.
Yes, they do. It's 8.833% of the index. Health insurance makes up 13% of that part, or about 1% of the overall CPI. So even a large increase in health care contributes only a tiny amount to inflation.
They account for health insurance in a different way than you might think just looking at those 13% / 1% numbers might suggest. The short version is that if you pay $10000 in insurance premiums, but get $8000 of health care costs covered, they call that $2000 of insurance cost (since youd be paying the $8000 out of pocket otherwise). Of course, with the state of insurance in the US, its more complicated that that in reality.
I think the overall 8.8% figure is probably reasonably accurate for total health care costs, on average.
That's the problem facing Yellen: not just doing enough, but doing something that won't just end up inflating the kinds of assets owned by the wealthy. Consumer prices have been stable because despite the increase in money supply, consumers as a whole were treading water (at best) even before the pandemic.
She would be happy to do something that caused CPI to get above 3%. It would mean the Fed could finally take the punch bowl away. They've been refilling it for well north of a decade, and it drains as fast as they fill.