But if you look at the sibling comment, all of that came from "Food away from home ". In other words, it's all because of takeout/restaurants, not groceries. Those were actually dragging inflation down.
But if you don't mind, I'll take 4.2% from your pay.
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 oligarchs. The stock market is still fine, nothing else matters.
From what I can tell it’s also supercharging coal, particularly in Asia.
…how? What is this agenda? Juicing short-term energy exports? That’s not a “dominance agenda.”
Basically, looking at inflation over time, we look pretty good here.
And the trend line would bend differently if we could just learn the lesson.
Prices are subject to the combination of the value of the currency and the value of the good. Food may be worth more than in the past, for example, so you cannot look at the value of the currency alone.
The higher-frequency data are more concerning. CPI “increased 0.5 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis in May, after rising 0.6 percent in April” and 0.9 percent in March [1]. (0.3, 0.2, 0.3 percent for December, January, February, respectively.)
So a linear trend of 6% from March, closer to 9% if one extrapolates the March-April-May quarter. Almost all of that driven by food and energy. Core spiked to 0.4% MoM in April, but calmed down to 0.2% in May, on trend with pre-war numbers. It’s up 2.9% YoY, but trending a bit lower. (Looked at another way, we’ve already “booked” 2.5% of inflation for ‘26. If we continue at 0.5% MoM, we close the year +5.6%. Even if it drops to pre-war 0.2%, we’re still going to be +3.8%. Given the resumption of hostilities, I’m betting we’ll be closer to the former.)
Together with the jobs numbers, it would be weird for an independent Fed to not raise rates.
See also the +25% inflation / -1.2% net wages after inflation over five years chart here, for those unfamiliar with how inflation % press releases are misleading over time. If household spending power is -1% after +4% inflation, then that inflation probably isn’t healthy for your country’s economic future, etc.
https://www.statista.com/chart/32428/inflation-and-wage-grow...
(I also suspect the wage index itself is disguising about the total wages paid index dropping like a stone, but haven’t done the math to chart it yet myself yet.)
By the way, that coffee is $9. Sorry, Brazil tariffs and everything else - you understand.
If you sat down and did the math on what it costs someone to pay rent / mortgage, car insurance, health insurance, daycare, schooling, going out to eat and drink, doing anything for entertainment, go to the grocery store.. it's not a debate that the real inflation is significantly higher all the time than what is used to measure the number.
The logical point here doesn't make much sense to me otherwise.
What jobs have the wages gone up 30% in that same time period? I’m sure a few, but not many.
Maybe you are the strawman consumer that skeptics point to in guaranteed basic income debates, who just stops working because they get a check.
Unless you're maybe one of the few specialists in deep learning, CUDA, etc.
There's been mass layoffs and downward pressure on compensation all over.
Oil has only really maintained the ~$100/barrel price because of record SPR releases worldwide. Also, that $100 price is kinda fake because it's a future price. The spot prices got much higher. Well, that runway is coming to an end. If the Strait of Hormuz re-opened today , we'd still be facing an energy shock. Plus there's famine coming.
Now the US won't run out of oil or refined petroleum products. The uS is now a net exporter. But it's a global marekt so the prices are going to go way up. And some countries and heavily dependent on oil for electricity. They are going to face blackouts.
So even though fertilizer shortages are skewed towards the Global South, food prices too are global so they're going up too.
In 1973, the energy shock took ~6 months to manifest [1].
But I think the real problem is dynamic pricing. Inflation is insidious. People start raising prices on the expectation of rising prices, thus causing prices to rise. But so many industries now are going well beyond that by essentially colluding through AI tools (eg RealPage) to further raise prices.
I honestly don't know how this ends without a deep, long recession.
[1]: https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/oil-crises-past-and-possi...
The same way Powell ended the last one without a deep, long recession.
All items: +0.5% monthly; +4.2% year-over-year.
Energy: +3.9% monthly; +23.5% year-over-year.
Gasoline: +7.0% monthly; +40.5% year-over-year.
Fuel oil: +58.9% year-over-year.
Electricity: +0.6% monthly; +5.9% year-over-year.
Utility natural gas: -0.5% monthly; +3.0% year-over-year.
Food overall: +0.2% monthly; +3.1% year-over-year.
Food at home / groceries: +0.1% monthly.
Food away from home / restaurants: +0.3% monthly.
Nonalcoholic beverages: +0.6% monthly.
Cereals and bakery products: +0.4% monthly.
Fruits and vegetables: +0.2% monthly.
Dairy: -0.6% monthly.
Meats, poultry, fish, and eggs: -0.2% monthly.
Core CPI / all items less food and energy: +0.2% monthly; +2.9% year-over-year.
Shelter overall: +0.3% monthly.
Rent: +0.4% monthly.
Owners’ equivalent rent: +0.3% monthly.
Lodging away from home: +0.4% monthly.
Communication: +1.3% monthly.
Airline fares: +2.7% monthly.
Personal care: +1.0% monthly.
Recreation: +0.3% monthly.
Apparel: +0.3% monthly.
Used cars and trucks: +0.1% monthly.
Medical care: +0.3% monthly.
Hospital services: +0.7% monthly.
Motor vehicle insurance: -1.7% monthly.
Household furnishings and operations: -0.6% monthly.
New vehicles: -0.3% monthly.
Prescription drugs: -0.9% monthly.
Steadily rising prices will be the norm from now on. What will be interesting to see is how fast the corporate elite figure they can boil the frogs without them noticing too much.
$50.00 hotdog is coming.
A rationale for the price rarely affects my choice. If I don’t want to buy something for a price, explaining that the guy won’t be able to survive without pricing it that high won’t get me to buy it. If I do want to buy something for a price, explaining that a guy is charging a hefty profit won’t get me to not buy it.
The only thing that will get me to buy it or not buy it is if it is at the point on the price/quality frontier where I want it.
This would make you the exception. Companies are constantly increasing prices to see how much they can charge consumers before they feel cheated and stop buying and/or enough customers get priced out to hurt profits.
Consumers tend to feel ripped off if they think a price increase was due to greed but are way more forgiving if the price increase was needed because of something outside of a company's control. That's why companies are quick to tell consumers that rising prices are due to things like fuel prices, sick chickens, or supply chain problems.
Of course, that tactic isn't as effective as it used to be since consumers have seen companies using those excuses and feed them lines like "We're all in this together!" while those same companies report skyrocketing profits and they've watched as prices remained high or even increased even after the fuel prices drop and supply chain issues resolve.
If I invest half my income and spend half my income, and the prices of the good goes up 4.2% and my income goes up 4.2%, then I've made progress; I'm now investing more than half my income, because the half of my income I was spending has stayed even and the half I was investing has increased.
Receiving "market" compensation trumps real-world expenses, since the market for one's labor is a different market than the real-world expenses.
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 the suburbs instead of in the urban core), you still come out behind.
This is the problem with people treat CPI as some word from the heavens...it is not. CPI is a highly constructed figure which conveniently includes/excludes things and is really more a floor of what the inflation is. Anyone living in the real world knows experienced inflation is way higher.
It’s an attempt at a central tendency in a complex economy with non-linear variability.
> Anyone living in the real world knows experienced inflation is way higher
Here is a map of wage changes across the U.S., 2024 to 2025 [1]. Lots of variance! If you’re on the West Coast, right now, you’re seeing above-CPI inflation. If you’re in the Northern Rockies, where I am, you’re seeing less.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/charts/county-employment-and-wages/perce...
Ah…inflation.
In high inflation countries you often get a revision every 2-3 months and you get a rise that is higher than the official inflation, as a result this solidifies the inflation and boosts the economy as everyone immediately buys whatever they can before it becomes more expensive. It's a vicious cycle.
Most of the average joe's money is spent on housing + food + energy these things are all way above the calculated """average""" inflation
> housing
This is actually the hardest to get right because it's the largest, and 2/3 of Americans own homes, so part of their costs are fixed.
Then there's the "owner's equivalent rent" BS and this is 25% of CPI. It answers the question "If someone were to rent your home today, how much do you think it would rent for monthly, unfurnished, and without utilities?" It assumes rental price and housing costs are somehow linked when in reality asset prices have far outstripped rent.
On average, nationally. Look up your state or metropolitan-area CPI. Or better yet, track your actual expenses and project forward.
CPI and PCE are great national statistics. I’m saying if you’re acting on a sub-national scale, there are better figures, though none as good as the one you compile for yourself. (Feeding bills and statements into an LLM should be a way to do this. Though, to be clear, I don’t do this.)
The median earner with a standard deduction would need a ~4.7% raise to stay even...
"Inflation" is also increasingly distributed unevenly. The top 10% continues to make up a larger and larger portion of spending. It is entirely possible for ~4.2% inflation to be substantially higher (or lower) for the median household than the overall reported number.
Then, any share price appreciation on the shares is captured by you at vesting, rather than being paid in cash (the value of which has been inflated away) and then purchasing shares/index that has risen in the last 1-4 years.
If you are paid in cash, you will be buying fewer shares per dollar (and per year) rather than getting the same number.
The administration's planning is much more along the lines of, Will this look cool when they announce it on Fox News tomorrow? If you think there's much beyond that, you're ascribing strategic clarity where there isn't any. They're continue to flail around and TACO until they have a result they can present to MAGA loyalists as a success, regardless of actual merits.
It's not a question of ethics. It's a question of competence.
I can believe the US/UK oil companies believe that.
It may even be true, because the energy transition caps the entire future opportunity for oil/gas sales, and all the producers have been trying to capture a larger share of that pied for the last 2 years or so.
But this intervention is so heavy-handed that it is visibly destroying that future market. It looks like all oil companies will lose a lot because of it, US/UK ones included.
> The Trump administration does not care about "its" population.
Yes, he's trying to govern like an oligarch. We will see in November if this was a good choice or if the US is still too democratic for this to work. Or earlier if he tries to avoid that test.
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, a 1.88× difference, and if you want to compare since when it doubled, it'd be around September 1996. This is according to a tool from INE, Spain’s national statistics: https://www.ine.es/varipc/index.do?L=1
Stash paper cash under your mattress and sure, you lose purchasing power. Use fiat money the way it's designed to be used, instead of using it like gold coins, and it works better.
Graph it without the logarithmic scale and draw a curve through the 1982-2018 data and the recent spike will explain why people are complaining about it.
"Well, inflation since 2015 is nonexistent if you swap out steaks for 3 day old catfish and fruits for kool aid packets"
It feels more likely your investment account gains are driving your decisions. Stock gains are also driven by inflation though!
I can sort of understand the feeling though, I just recently got a 2.5% raise for "inflation", which hardly feels like it's making a dent.
bjourne•1h ago
Ancalagon•1h ago
AnimalMuppet•1h ago
advisedwang•1h ago
jghn•1h ago
ortusdux•1h ago
https://www.drewry.co.uk/supply-chain-advisors/supply-chain-...
Terr_•10m ago
With respect to those numbers, I remember this about potential price-fixing that might have an effect... although I also have reservations about how much to trust anything coming out of the infected US Department of Justice these days.
> [...] indicted for conspiring to restrict the output of — and fix the prices of — nearly all of the world’s standard unrefrigerated shipping containers [...] roughly doubled the prices of standard shipping containers between 2019 and 2021
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/four-worlds-largest-container...