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US Consumer Price Index up 4.2%

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Re: US Consumer Price Index up 4.2%

#201

Post by [deleted] »

thewebguyd wrote: post #16
bluGill wrote: post #7

Remember this next time you get your yearly review/raise. 4.2% is what you need to stay even, anything less is a pay cut.

Not necessarily, depends on the distribution of your own expenses. If you deviate from the average urban household (lets say, you have a particularly long commute or your car isn't as fuel efficient as the average. Look at the increase on fuel prices, 40.5%!). If you're at $5,000/month, a 4.2% raise puts you at $5,210. If you're spending $600/month on gas (not unreasonable for someone that drives an SUV and lives in…

[deleted]

Re: US Consumer Price Index up 4.2%

#203

Post by asdff »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #189
asdff wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pick your favorite crop and look at yields per acre over the last century.

If I have to look at an entire century I think that proves my point.

I mean looking at fold change, even full order of magnitude increases is pretty interesting.

Re: US Consumer Price Index up 4.2%

#204

Post by xenadu02 »

tastyfreeze wrote: post #107
hadlock wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2% is good, anything over 3% is not good, anything over 4% is bad, 5% and higher is really bad. Hope that clears things up for you.

The FED says that 2% is good. 2% is not good. Their target of 2% per year means we have 2% compounding annually devaluation of our currency.

That's by design.

If currency doesn't devalue then stuffing it under a mattress looks like a reasonable alternative to investing. If we hit deflation you can receive gains for "free" and borrowed money becomes more expensive over time. Neither of which our economic system is setup to handle.

We punish people who hoard cash by devaluing it thus encouraging them to put the money to work.

Re: US Consumer Price Index up 4.2%

#205

Post by markerz »

jr3592 wrote: post #185
dw_arthur wrote: post #93

Paradoxically, inflation has contributed to me taking a sabbatical. While I live in a LCOL area and made ~140k/year it just no longer felt worth it to work as I saw my retirement accounts start to match and exceed my salary in yearly gains. I do plan on going back to work in a part time manner, but inflation has killed any reason for me to work hard at a job for that level of salary. Furthermore, the feeling of "what…

This actually makes 0 sense. Like, do you even understand what you're saying? The value of your savings is decreasing at a faster rate than ever before, so its a good time to stop saving and spend it? The stock market increasing is not the same thing as inflation. What you're saying makes sense only if you are referring to stock market valuation... strictly retiring because inflation is high makes no sense.

> Like, do you even understand what you're saying?

That comment is unnecessary and has the effect of making people feel bad.

I think the rationale is that wages are stagnant in comparison to investments (stocks) and costs (inflation). So there's decreased incentive to focus on wages as a form of income, and more incentive to focus on investments.

I've definitely felt this personally, as my income shifts towards investments, my will to work for a wage has decreased. That shift has increased because I've accured more investments, but also because investments have grown kind of ridiculously compared to my wage.

Re: US Consumer Price Index up 4.2%

#206

Post by JumpCrisscross »

jmyeet wrote: post #183
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> don't know how this ends without a deep, long recession The same way Powell ended the last one without a deep, long recession.

You mean with the greatest wealth transfer to the wealthy in history that added a quarter to our entire national debt? Yeah, you can't do that often. The US national debt is about to hit $40 trillion. It was $20 trillion 9 years ago. What Trump and Biden should've done is implemented a windfall profits tax of probably 80%. But there's absolutely zero chance of that happening by either party.

> mean with the greatest wealth transfer to the wealthy in history that added a quarter to our entire national debt?

The national debt was added before the inflation took hold to counter the Covid recession. (When the MMT nutters were at the helm.)

Powell cured the resulting inflation without causing a recession. He did that without adding anything to our national debt.

> What Trump and Biden should've done is implemented a windfall profits tax of probably 80%

This just creates a political game of defining what is and isn't a windfall. A progressive corporate tax achieves what I think you want to without the side effects.

Either way, the playbook for getting out of this is steeply increasing rates and then moderating them before inflation hits target.

Re: US Consumer Price Index up 4.2%

#207

Post by neves »

hadlock wrote: post #82
embedding-shape wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Prices are up +4.25% in the past year, and +24.49% in the past 5 years, according to the latest CPI data released Jun. 10, 2026. The price level has approximately doubled (2.01x) today compared to August 1999. Not knowing if that's good/bad, as it is without any frame of reference, so the same data for Spain looks something like this: Prices up +3.2% in the past year, up +22.4% in the past 5 years. Compared to 1999…

2% is good, anything over 3% is not good, anything over 4% is bad, 5% and higher is really bad. Hope that clears things up for you.

It depends on the country. Brazil, due to its hyperinflation days, has a lot of indexed prices. These are prices that automatically increase due to inflation. This makes the country to have so called inertial inflation, current inflation caused by past inflation, and also makes it more robust to a higher inflation.

Re: US Consumer Price Index up 4.2%

#208

Post by littlexsparkee »

jhallenworld wrote: post #96
dehrmann wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not necessarily "cooked," (but they certainly can be). Inflation is genuinely hard to calculate since it's different for everyone, goods and services purchased drift over time, and as you mentioned, that exact good also changes over time. CPI (and others) are more useful in a MoM or YoY context. At 10 years, it's better viewed as best guess cost of typical living rather than an economic indicator comparing ap…

No it's cooked. For high tech items, they assume that improved technology means you are getting more for your money even if the price goes up, so they discount it. It's true that you get more for your money, but it ignores threshold effects, like you just can't buy an equivalent phone for $10 even if todays phone's are 200x better. Then there's the "owner's equivalent rent" BS and this is 25% of CPI. It answers the q…

why should the asset prices matter in OER? the aim is understanding cost. BLS no longer questions homeowners but samples local rents to estimate OER since homeowners could've been wrong in their guess. of course, someone may have locked in a low interest rate so their expense is overstated. counterargument is that you are consuming a more valuable service by occupying the unit even though market rent exceeds your costs so it doesn't matter if your cost is assumed to be the market rent. note there is a 6-month sampling lag of rents, which doesn't help the perception gap in the inflation figures.

Re: US Consumer Price Index up 4.2%

#209

Post by Barrin92 »

23ahgfqa wrote: post #10

The Iran conflict will continue on a low flame (occasional pinpricks like now) forever. It serves the US Energy Dominance Agenda against China, Japan, India and the EU. The Trump administration does not care about "its" population. There were already rumors early in the Trump term that Trump would not mind a recession so that his real estate cronies could buy cheap foreclosures. So it is all a double win for the olig…

I've seen this strange theory pop up a few times but it makes absolutely zero sense.

For one even in the short term this is benefiting China as its the largest renewables producer in the world and much less exposed to ME fuels than Japan and America's allies, who are to put it in plain English, fucked. (Japan gets 80-90% of its resources from the Gulf, China ~15-20%)

Secondly the only thing that wakes the American voter out of his or her perpetual stupor is the cost at the gas station, and every single person responsible for this will be voted out of office. I cannot imagine that even the oil industry wants a blue wave just because they could crank the prices for a few months

Re: US Consumer Price Index up 4.2%

#210

Post by greyface- »

xenadu02 wrote: post #204
tastyfreeze wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FED says that 2% is good. 2% is not good. Their target of 2% per year means we have 2% compounding annually devaluation of our currency.

That's by design. If currency doesn't devalue then stuffing it under a mattress looks like a reasonable alternative to investing. If we hit deflation you can receive gains for "free" and borrowed money becomes more expensive over time. Neither of which our economic system is setup to handle. We punish people who hoard cash by devaluing it thus encouraging them to put the money to work.

One side says this design is necessary to sustain growth. The other says it's unfair because the gains from the growth are unevenly distributed. Neither is wrong.
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