>The data, when paired with prior months’ lower-than-expected readings, point to more consistent signs that inflation is easing and may pave the way for the Fed to downshift to a quarter-point hike at their next meeting ending Feb. 1.
I hope not. There's an absurd amount of dumb money floating around, and YoY inflation is still at 6.5%. Higher interest rates are going to force companies and investors to actually post profits instead of functioning as giant leeches on the economy.
Headline and Core CPI printed 'as expected' however Services CPI soared to the highest in 40 years, real wages shrank for the 21st month in a row and housing costs continue to soar
Note this is CPI, which is not the measure the Fed uses for gauging inflation.
The Fed uses PCE. It is likely to behave similarly to CPI, though part of the reason the Fed has been as aggressive as long as it has is that PCE diverged more than is historically common from CPI during the inflation spike, spiking higher and coming down more slowly..
Annualized over the last 6 months inflation is now under the 2% target. I would be surprised if we see anything more than a quarter-point at the next meeting.
I couldn't find this particular piece of data published anywhere, but I did a little math and arrived at an annualized rate of inflation for the last 6 months of 5.85%, well above the 2% target.
Cash is trash. It’s headed toward zero in the long run.
They’ve barely unwound any of the Feds balance sheet. I think it’s ridiculous for the markets to assume the fight is over and position for a pivot.
Imagine what would happen if the fed started selling $100B+ in treasuries per month. EVENTUALLY we’re gonna have to address that plus our enormous congressional deficit.
The fact you are getting downvoted is simply amazing to me. It shows people are just not ready to look at reality of budgeting. People are honestly under the illusion that debt is just a number and can never get too high. Nothing is forever.
People have strong opinions about the economy without understanding monetary policy.
It doesn’t take a genius to observe cash is GUARANTEED to loose value. In the current environment it’s the least safe asset…it just doesn’t have the same volatility to it!
The Fed can't lower rates if only because it needs to maintain its credibility. The financial press has been cranking out opinion pieces disguised as serious analysis nonstop in an attempt to wish a change of monetary policy into being. If the Fed backs down anytime soon, it could decrease the effectiveness of future increases. The next time the Fed raises rates, consumers, asset holders and businesses can just tell themselves that this increase will be brief and the Fed will soon lower rates. The Fed is engaged in a game of psychological brinkmanship with asset holders and businesses who think they can ride this out. Only when the latter capitulate - by selling houses for lower prices for example - can the Fed begin to consider lowering rates. The Fed needs to hammer home the message that you can't fight the Fed.
Also unless the inflation rate goes negative, the actual price of goods is not going down, it's just increasing slower because you had a whole years worth of high inflation. If YoY inflation goes down that just means last year's inflation was already so high, relative to this year we are "only" increasing by 3% or 4%, etc.
In that sense the inflation is now baked in, and we only make future increases slower but we don't unwind back to the original price without some serious deflation.
1. There are things like “shrink-flation” not captured. I’ve noticed most packaged goods have reduced in size 10-20%. Eggs have more than doubled, milk is up 25%, etc
I don’t care what the government publishes. My friends around the country all confirm this. My own bills (I track itemized) show it as well. Though, to your point, much of the increase occurred in 2021 - it just never came down.
2. Fuel is only down because the US has used its strategic reserve to increase supply. At the same time demand dropped dramatically, with China lockdowns & increased prices forcing manufacturing / transportation to cease. Now the election season is over I suspect the strategic reserve will stop being drained; further if price caps work on Russia… we will see a massive reduction in the global fuel supply (Russia will just stop pumping as its unprofitable).
> There are things like “shrink-flation” not captured
I hear this everywhere, but as far as I can tell its a complete myth. The "basket of goods" that CPI is based on does keep track of changes in quality and quantity of the goods.
> If the selected item is no longer available, or if there have been changes in the quality or quantity (for example, a container of orange juice containing 59 ounces instead of 64 ounces) of the good or service since the last time prices were collected, the data collector selects a new item similar to the old item. This is referred to as a substitution.
> When substitution occurs, the commodity analyst reviews the new item and price. The new price may be quality adjusted for use in index computation. Conceptually, the CPI seeks to be a constant-quality measure, though accurately quantifying quality change may not always be possible. Detailed information about quality adjustment procedures is in the calculation section.
This is a key point and massive misunderstanding in everybody I know : there's this expectation that when "inflation slows down", then "prices will return to normal". But that's empathically not what it means.
If prices rose whatever percent last 18 months, and inflation drops to zero tomorrow... Prices will stay exactly the same. They just won't increase further day to day any more (at zero inflation).
"Inflation is still high, I know that because prices are still up compared to before " is a logical error.
The real struggle is the government - fed, treasury, etc all claimed the inflation was “transitory”. A lot of people have been caught off guard. Aka people expected a deflation.
I was pointing out most of the increase the last 3 years occurred in 2021. I actually believe 2022 has far higher inflation than they claim in government figures. At least locally, it’s higher based on my tracking.
2023 will be worse for food due to fertilizer issues, I suspect fuel prices will also increase. Effectively, expect more expensive commodities. That said I’d suspect housing and other goods being kept up with loans to decrease.
For fertilizers - it takes ~10 years to get potassium online, for instance. The other chemicals take 3-5 years, so we shall see how this goes.
> The real struggle is the government - fed, treasury, etc all claimed the inflation was “transitory”. A lot of people have been caught off guard. Aka people expected a deflation.
The prediction that inflation spike was transitory (which was universally abandoned anyway) was not a prediction of a rapid return to past prices, but of a rapid return without significant policy intervention to normal rates of inflation.
> At least locally, it’s higher based on my tracking.
Local inflation tends to differ from the national average one way or the other, and I doubt your tracking is anywhere close tonas comprehensive and systematic as any of the major federal government inflation measures.
OTOH, the PCE—which is what the Fed uses to guide police decisions—during the spike has jumped higher than the CPI and came down slower, so “the CPI has understated recent inflation” is part of the premise of recent monetary policy.
> fed, treasury, etc all claimed the inflation was “transitory”
That is precisely what "Core measure rose 0.3% in December" means. The period of high inflation is (apparently) over. The price increases that inflation generated will tend to stick around.
1. Nobody is saying that there has been deflation, so yes, prices that have gone up will remain up. The old baseline, the one in your head, that's gone. The question now is will prices keep going up, and the answer seems to be no.
In addition, a series of issues unrelated to monetary policy have hit individual items like eggs (avian flu) and lettuce (INSV) and so on, because food is messy.
2. The election season has been over for two months, and yet the SPR is continuing to contribute to US supply[0], so apparently not everybody thinks solely in election terms.
Russia is more complicated; they are at least as focused on their limited opportunities to earn and spend money given sanctions as on hurting us, which they might see as less easy to do now that the election season has been over for two months.
> 1. There are things like “shrink-flation” not captured.
Poppycock. From StatCan, who do the CPI numbers in Canada:
> 7.10 Quantity adjustment entails accounting for changes in the quantity (e.g. package size, number of tissue ply, etc.) of observed POs. This is another implicit method of quality adjustment because it is assumed that the quality per standardized unit is the same over time.
> 2. Fuel is only down because the US has used its strategic reserve to increase supply.
Fuel is down in Canada as well, which has no strategic reserve. Or it could be because geopolitical events have stabilized a bit and global oil prices are down:
> Though, to your point, much of the increase occurred in 2021 - it just never came down.
Yeah, the data is inflation going down (and not to negative values) year over year, not prices going down. Just means prices are inflating slower, not going negative.
And shrinkflation has been around for decades. It was a thing even when inflation was at 'normal' 2% levels.
Edgar Dworsky is the guy that all the media companies bring on as the expert on shrinkflation (just look up his name, pretty much all news sites have articles about him), has had his blog up pointing out all the instances of shrinkflation since as far back as 2006[1].
RE 2: As far as I can tell the last strategic reserve sale occurred in mid-November with no sales in December / bids for repurchases being solicited. It's possible that the supply effects continued through December, but it seems a bit tenuous without economic modeling.
How much of the average shopper's budget is eggs? If it's not that big a percentage then you're just not going to see it in the overall inflation rate, and you wouldn't expect to.
Eggs are significant ingredient in many homemade things (eggs, bread, pancakes, pastas, brownies) and one of the cheapest,cleanest protein sources in the American diet.
The Aivian flu + inflation caused a carton of 18 eggs to increase in price more than 50% recently (<$5 to > $7.50).
My household has fought this increase by increasing mushrooms and spinach in our eggs, and recently hybridizing with liquid egg whites.
> Eggs are significant ingredient in many homemade things (eggs, bread, pancakes, pastas, brownies) and one of the cheapest,cleanest protein sources in the American diet.
Yes, and food makes up ~13% of the BLS CPI. This is taken into account when they do their surveys to see what people are spending their money on:
Remember that the CPI is the national average inflation for an average basket of goods, and not your personal inflation. In Canada, StatCan actually has a personal CPI tool so that you can see how things are for your personal basket of goods:
Sure, you can cherry-pick individual items to tell pretty much any story you like.
If the 60% increase in butter prices over the last year is hitting your budget, you probably would benefit from eating less butter. (And I say this as someone who eats a good amount of butter...)
At some point it stop being cherry picking and becomes an actual measure.
The official BLS numbers are underreporting inflation. Overall, groceries are up roughly 35-50% since 2020, while the official numbers would have you believe the inflation was 18.17% over 3 years.
BLS does a lot of trickery to generate favorable numbers. There are "quality" adjustments, there are "core" inflation indicators, which exclude goods with high price fluctuations (e.g. eggs).
I buy a pretty diverse basket of goods (groceries too) overall, and so far, none of the official inflation figures have even come close to my observed price increases.
Lumber, tools and hardware in home improvement stores are all up 30-60%. Food, like I said, is up 30% at minimum since the start of the pandemic.
Maybe clothes and TVs kept a stable price, but who cares?
Sigh. "My personal number is higher" isn't a good way to contest a national, fairly rigorous process run by professionals. I can pick a basket of goods from my local Wegmans that's gone up 100%; I don't doubt it's higher than the CPI number for some people. That's how averages work; there'll be some people for which it's lower, too, and their anecdotes have equally little value for national policy decisions.
Lumber, incidentally, is back to normal nationally. Down 63% in 2022. If you're still seeing 60% above normal, you're either in an area with a supply issue, or you're getting hosed by the store. https://www.wxpr.org/business-economics/2023-01-04/despite-i...
You want to talk about professionals? Why not Shadowstat? The person who is doing the national calculation is not pro. They are bureaucrats subject to political adjustments. I have friends in six states everyone of them tallying their monthly expenses which increased more than 30%+ compared sametime last year. If yours didnt either you have significantly cut down your expense or oddly expensing very different to many others. The CPI is grossly not reflecting the reality.
Perhaps its the people who cook with a lot of home ingredients (eggs, meats, vegetables, fruits) that are feeling the most pain. My food budget has gone up 25% in the last year for the same basket of goods. I track those numbers pretty consistently.
Yes, some individuals will see higher than average inflation in their basket. Others will see lower than average. That's why we work with the averages for policy decisions rather than looking for individual anecdotes.
If I subsist entirely off the cocktail shrimp at my local Wegmans and have no other expenses, my inflation value is something like 500%. Is that a particularly useful number for the Fed? No.
Cocktail shrimp sounds extravagant; that's not what we're talking about. GP is on point. We're talking about basic staples, the real food you find on the edges of the grocery store, not the highly processed items in the middle.
You've misread my comment. The cocktail shrimp example is why "nuh uh, my personal number is higher" is not a valuable data point. Maybe you go to an expensive store, maybe you buy the fancier lettuce, maybe your basket includes some things you consider staples that aren't all that common nationally.
It's why we have a nation-wide check on the prices of a well-researched selection of staples in the average proportions they make up in an average person's budget, rather than polling random people on the Internet for anecdotes. That number is far more useful.
If you purchase more or less food than average, then your personal CPI will be different that the average that is reported in headlines. Further, the fact that you see some the price (inflation) in your face regularly is a form of cognitive bias:
People noticed petrol prices go up and that inflation, but they're thinking less about the deflation of petrol going down, probably because they think the lower prices are "normal".
That's just more cherry picking. The appropriate thing to do is to create a collection of food items that represent some sort of average of the population expenses and measure that.
And when they do this, they compute that food-at-home rose 0.2% in December (2.4% annualized).
Okay, but the experience of the average American is what actually matters when tallying inflation. It's not about what people "should" be spending money on, it's about what people actually spend money on.
Surely putting together an inflation index consciously designed not to replicate an average American diet would be a much, much worse measure of food inflation than one that does actually try to model the average American's situation? "Everyone should be going paleo so the index shouldn't have bread in it" is a self-evidently bad idea, that's not a statistician's job. A single inflation number is hardly ever going to be a correct measurement of any single person's experience of inflation, but that's inevitable.
There are real criticisms to make, such as the average basket of goods not characterizing the inflation felt by the poorest, because they spend money on different things than people with a bit more money.
Ok, since you strawmanned me against bread (which has also increased significantly, at least 5% YOY) , let's consider this: if nobody could afford anything but Doritos, and the price of Doritos went from $4 to $3, then the average basket of goods would go decrease in price >20%. It's a great model if you want to hide the deteriorating quality of life behind effectively meaningless stats. What I don't understand is why so many people feel compelled to defend it so vigorously.
It just seems like people have extremely high expectations for what a single number could possibly encompass. It's a single, summary statistic- it's not going to ever be anything more than that. Of course low inflation doesn't mean everything's perfect and prices are just fine. It doesn't say anything about how poor or rich people are, what they can afford, or how wealth is distributed in society.
It is just an (imperfect!) aggregate measure of prices, and it certainly seems to capture something- inflation was low for a long time, then COVID, then it got high, then rates went up, then it went down again. When inflation is very high there aren't many inflation truthers going around insisting that actually, inflation is low; when inflation falls or stays low, there's always people insisting that actually not everything is great. Which: yes! You can have low inflation and all sorts of problems! But having those problems and high inflation is worse.
It's not hiding anything, it's just not rich enough to capture everything you're interested in.
So? The federal reserve would have to have a very different mandate for it to make policy based off of a basket optimized for public health. I'm sorry that your personal food prices are higher. I just don't see why it matters at scale.
Great, the price of ramen noodles and curved screen TVs is stable. Thanks, Fed, time to set interest rates at -1% for the next ten years of whacky growth.
Low inflation doesn't mean everything is fine, it just means that you don't have exponentially inflating prices on top of whatever other problems you've got.
Eggs are way up. Fortunately, the government takes a blend of different products and presents the overall price change. If we made policy off the whims of onion prices, for example, we'd be in for a wild ride.
Every month for the last six months has produced the same comment. Overall inflation is low so somebody picks out a specific thing that went up a lot and implies that the government numbers are either misleading or lies. Interestingly, it is a different chosen product each month.
Egg prices are also being driven largely by disease and culling and don't really represent something that should be attacked with monetary policy.
isnt his point that the price of groceries has recently only grown a small amount? compared to previous months or quarters which have grown quite a bit
For folks unaware, the reason eggs have become more expensive in the US is due to an avian flu that is killing a significant number of egg laying hens.
It is complicated. Raw leafy greens are now a major disease vector since they can come into contact with animal waste during processing and the safety of animal protein has improved dramatically over the past few generations. This leads to sudden "oh fuck, destroy the entire crop" situations that spike prices. That's bad.
But... there is no question that industrialized agriculture keeps the price of lettuce lower on average than non-industrialized approaches. If you are just watching prices, the trade is still positive.
That's 12 eggs a week. So if the price of a dozen eggs has gone from $2 to $5 you are out... $150 a year. And that's for a sizable outlier in egg consumption. It isn't hard to see how this doesn't push overall inflation very meaningfully.
Most store-bought dried pasta has zero egg in it.
An entire homemade cake has like three eggs in it. So the price of an entire cake is up less than a dollar. How many cakes does the average household bake in a year?
- Cheapest (Cheaper than pork and chicken per g of protein)
- An important ingredient (as a lectin) in many baked goods
You then turn this into an absolute number for 1. But your absolute number of a $150/person/year would certainly approach 10% of my annual grocery spend... which lines up. Your absolute number would be frightening for a family of 4 making the median income.
Inflation is not personally affecting me negatively - for the record, I think it's a reversion to the mean and 10 years of fed targets finally being achieved.
Also, it seems pretty silly to talk about a dollar of extra cost as a problem in the context of making homemade pasta. Homemade pasta is a time intensive luxury.
There are other knock-on effects....avian flu, weird hiccups in the supply chain. I'm curious to see how this will affect day to day stuff as so many thing I run into just get filed under 'the times we live in'.
not surprising. now that the covid related spike is far enough in the past I expect inflation to be down drastically since the throttle that was low rates is no longer being pressed on. question is, will the Fed stop raising rates soon enough?
> Nine times since 1961, the central bank has embarked on a series of interest rate increases to rein in inflation. Eight times a recession followed. The only true “soft landing” — as significant rate hikes with no subsequent slumps are called — occurred in 1994, according to a March 25 report by investment bank Piper Sandler. Not a sterling track record.
Sure it is, raising rates, e.g. 0.25 this time, 0.50 this time, etc results in increased likelihood of a recession. This is why the rate has been slowing down (e.g. 0.75 last time to a likely 0.50 this time) in order to have a soft landing.
No, it is not. You meant some sort of recession, as if thats an undesired massive financial correction. This has been a long time coming and is better in the long run if the correction happens sooner than later. Good luck with whatever.
Inflation spiked and is going down. The nature of YoY changes is such that even if prices stayed the same (not inflation, which is inherently 2nd order) inflation will go down. Hence, the reset. If you consider COVID an anomaly, which it is, this is the natural conclusion, which we're now seeing.
Can you add something to the discussion by either sharing what your records show for you personally or addressing why a large/broad dataset is "meaningless" in the face of your smaller dataset?
It's meaningless because every individual follows his or her own life. For example, getting a new house might increase your rent while the "average" rent drops.
What I'm trying to say is, unless for investment or research, these data doesn't have much to do with we as individuals. You can see people arguing that "You all feel X goes up but I don't feel that", and I'm just saying the same thing but from a different perspective.
Mostly people arguing that the numbers are "wrong" are misunderstanding what low inflation means. Low inflation means prices won't continue to rise. It does not mean that prices will come down. The prices you remember from two years ago, they're gone. They're not even considered when calculating inflation numbers now.
True, but price fluctuations are still "individual" things, when we consider the cost. The CPI is at best a very vague/inaccurate number for personal financial planning. Looking at one's bills are far more useful.
Yeah, that's why I don't think we should use individual cases when discussing CPI, as shown by many comments here. Instead let's focus on macroeconomic discussion.
