US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

Frankly, I haven't seen a single country where I spent any significant amount of time, where official inflation numbers were not seeing as a complete joke by the common folks. And my experience usually matched it.

There's plenty of space to hide reality when building a price index.

Price index do not capture the reality of most people cost of living. They don't capture the family that have to buy margarine instead of butter, because butter became too expensive, while margarine became cheaper, Weight both items as the same, and voilá! no inflation, increases in the price of butter were cancelled by cheaper margarine, fuck you if you prefer butter.

We can also do the same with housing: Capture prices as the average of a basket of cities. In reality, some cities will have absurd price increases while others are in decadence. The average prices increase of a disputed locality like NYC metro area will probably be masked by the fact that houses in BeltRustAssEnd, MI are becoming increasingly cheap. But, for the real person, what the fuck matters if BeltRustAssEnd houses are cheap as bananas? Who can get a job there?

And of course, a single number cannot capture the subtleties of reality like the fact that while it is great that 80" TVs are now so cheap that they can be bought by the commoner, this fact means fucking nothing if having a roof over your head in a place where you don't need to spend most of your live commuting is becoming increasingly too expensive for a lot of the same folks. Too bad the commoner is just a paycheck away from being in the streets as he cannot pay for a house! He now has a TV that not even Queen Elisabeth could have just a few years ago!

The Pentagon’s informal name for those bases is “the Noose.”

Exactly. Don't know about all of Europe, but I find the way inflation is calculated in the countries i lived here as bad faith since it intentionally omits housing costs.

So just like a commenter below said, I haven't seen a single country where I spent any significant amount of time, where official inflation numbers were not seeing as a complete joke by the common folks. Everyone unanimously agreed the numbers are gamed in order to control public opinion.

I've also seen a lot of gaslighting from politicians with mental gymnastics on how the population is not poor but actually rich because "look how many (Asian made)washing machines you can buy with an average salary here today, while for previous generations this type of items was a luxury".

Yeah mate, my parent could barely afford a European made washing machine, but they could afford their own house at age 25-30, working jobs that required litte education. Must be all that avocado toast to blame.

Apparently, they've decided to go with "just not report the numbers."

(Source: https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/trumps-bls-pick-could-p...).

it works as long as all businesses are working together to fix prices, all it takes is one to undercut the other and reap the reward then it's every person/business for itself. I don't really care because, like you, my thought is go ahead and raise prices all you want I just won't be buying.