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U.S. annual inflation rate drops to 8.5%

bls.gov

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Re: U.S. annual inflation rate drops to 8.5%

#541

Post by twoodfin »

zht wrote: post #489
twoodfin wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Median income in 1990 was $50,500. That's already in CPI-adjusted dollars. Nominal median household income in 1990 was $30k: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N

im always curious about people (not you, the person you are replying to) who pop out metrics like these and mis-interpret them (not maliciously I'm assuming). I always wonder how many people they've repeated those facts to (most of whom won't fact check or think twice about it) and how many of THOSE people repeated them to other people THEY know.

I'm less interested in the people since it's pretty obvious why these "factoids" are so appealing to believe & spread. I find it more fun to catalog the more common ones and track their origins. Two of my favorites:

- "Medical debt is the #1 cause of bankruptcies." This goes back to a handful of papers by, among others, now-Senator Elizabeth Warren and colleagues at the Harvard School of Public Health. There was a lot of back-and-forth at the time, but I'll sum up the objection to the thrust of the papers and the factoid: People who go into bankruptcy tend to have all kinds of debt, and the authors made no rigorous attempt to establish the specific "but-for" causality of medical debt.

- "40% of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck." This comes, AFAICT, from the annual Federal Reserve "SHED" survey on household economic well-being. There's lots of good data in these, but downers somehow latched onto the "How would you handle an unexpected $400 expense?" question and interpreted any response other than paying it off in cash or equivalent as "living paycheck-to-paycheck". FWIW, the "pay it off" response has become more popular every year of the survey's existence, rising from 50% in 2013 to 68% in 2021[1].

[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/2021-repor...

Re: U.S. annual inflation rate drops to 8.5%

#542

Post by ajross »

scottLobster wrote: post #266

Great. All I know is I'm trading a lot more time for money this year. Way less takeout, avoiding toll roads unless it saves at least 30 minutes, fewer streaming services (will renew on a show-by-show basis), and food is getting so crazy I might start going to multiple stores to try and save money instead of my one consolidated trip to Wegmans. I'm also stuffing my freezer with meat and have a year's supply of non-per…

> not because I'm a prepper but because I know [meat will] be so much more expensive next year

Want to take that bet? There's absolutely no reason to expect inflation borne of energy costs and trade disruption to continue. Remember (and so, so many people fail to understand this) that inflation is a year-over-year metric. The report today showing a drop in the "inflation rate" is actually showing an instantaneous decrease in absolute prices (fuels, primarily, like the ones needed to ship the meat you bought because you thought it was going to be expensive).

To wit: It is very likely that what you've done is stuffed your freezer full of meat you purchased at a price maximum.

Also, just because I have to ask: you're so concerned about prices that you're willing to make major changes to your lifestyle. But... you didn't even consider things like "eating less meat"?

Re: U.S. annual inflation rate drops to 8.5%

#543

Post by [deleted] »

hajile wrote: post #380
jliptzin wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Avg gasoline prices are down 20% in 2 months. Is that noise? https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_gas_price

That's an artifact of dumping 30% of the strategic oil reserves into the market to drive down prices. Maybe the prices stay low, but with Europe warning of fuel shortages this winter, I can't see that happening.

[deleted]

Re: U.S. annual inflation rate drops to 8.5%

#544

Post by lettergram »

thematrixturtle wrote: post #382
manimino wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who exactly is "they"? The... Big Bug industry?

"Eat the Bugs" has become a far-right/anti-woke catchphrase. This video is typical: https://youtu.be/8_8LTUmHWP0

Lol what did I just watch?

From a quick search it appears eating of bugs specifically refers to the WEF push:

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/07/good-grub-why-we-migh...

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/07/why-we-need-to-give-i...

don’t know about the catch phrase or how it’s “anti-woke” but interesting

Re: U.S. annual inflation rate drops to 8.5%

#545

Post by UncleMeat »

jonnycomputer wrote: post #482
jacknews wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He certainly doesn't want highER numbers. It isn't that the published inflation figures are falsified, or lies. They just don't truly reflect the cost of living, due to adjustments, hedonics, omissions, choice of basket items, product crapification and shrinkage, etc. But with so many dissenting posts here getting flagged, you have to wonder.

They actually publish multiple indexes. I think it is hard enough a problem that a lot of people find can find something they don't like about any one of them.

It is the same story with unemployment. "Oh, the government doesn't want you to know how many people stopped looking for work because it makes them look bad." When the U-6 number is right there in the same report at the U-3 number.

Re: U.S. annual inflation rate drops to 8.5%

#546

Post by prionassembly »

kqr wrote: post #286
radioactivist wrote: post #97

So the year over year CPI increase each month this year (starting from January) was 7.5%, 7.9%, 8.5%, 8.3%, 8.6%, 9.1%, 8.5%. So this value has been jumping around a bit as it has been going up. This drop is being taken as good news -- but I worry whether this is really a meaningful drop or whether we are just over interpreting what could be a fundamentally noisy metric?

This is what statistical process control charts were invented to tell us: https://static.loop54.com/XmR.html?baseline=7.5,7.9,8.5,8.3,... Nope, last number is well within the limits set by the variation of the previous numbers. Depending on how sensitive you feel like being to false alarms, I wouldn't even say there's been a clear trend this year. If you detrend it by successive differences we see that the slope is v…

Deming statistics are a cargo cult. Try running some (Monte Carlo style) simulations; I did these many moons ago and they don't work at all.

Re: U.S. annual inflation rate drops to 8.5%

#548

Post by readthenotes1 »

kshacker wrote: post #531
inflationish wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just read about the inflation trimming. It is one of the ways the government make inflation to appear lower than it is, making people happy. In US, the 31% of the goods with highest inflation are excluded, but only 24% of the goods with lowest inflation, making the inflation appear much lower than it is.

Then that should hurt them when inflation reduces, no?

How? If they're always excluding 7% more of the goods whose prices rose more, the trimmed CPI will always be lower than the CPI-U, which some people say is always lower than what people actually experience.

The entitlement adjustments made based on trimmed CPI will always be less than the inflation even the gov't admits people are experiencing.

Re: U.S. annual inflation rate drops to 8.5%

#549

Post by glouwbug »

jacknews wrote: post #116
silent_cal wrote: post #98

These inflation numbers, as I assume other flagged posts have already pointed out, are extremely misleading. Does anyone really think that housing, food, gas, or any other major consumer expense has only risen 8.5% since a year ago?

Right, all my food staples are +20% from a year ago-ish. I guess TV's are cheaper (and 'better'), so they use that double-plus-goodness to bring down the headline inflation figure. Nevermind you can't eat your TV (which now has ads, by the way) or ride it to work. You could burn it to cook on and heat yourself, I suppose.

If anything TVs serve ads to buy consumerist goods which are up +20%

Re: U.S. annual inflation rate drops to 8.5%

#550

Post by kqr »

TaylorPhebillo wrote: post #488
kqr wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what statistical process control charts were invented to tell us: https://static.loop54.com/XmR.html?baseline=7.5,7.9,8.5,8.3,... Nope, last number is well within the limits set by the variation of the previous numbers. Depending on how sensitive you feel like being to false alarms, I wouldn't even say there's been a clear trend this year. If you detrend it by successive differences we see that the slope is v…

I'm not familiar with this, does this method require that each value is measured independently of the others? Because in that case, you'd want to use monthly inflation rates, rather than monthly estimates of inflation relative to 12 months prior, right?

Ideally, yes. I read too quickly and assumed that these were annualised monthly measurements.

However -- the technique might work anyway: the signal would be smaller, but so should the variation. Yes, one decreases as the square root and the other does not, but over just 12 months that might not make a big difference.

Only backtesting or a more thorough theoretical investigation can tell!

Edit: actually it doesn't have to be very thorough at all, it's a factor of 3. Probably important!

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