The Inflation Numbers Are Undeniable Now
There’s no getting around it: The September data have dashed any hopes that inflation is transitory.
We surrender.
Source: Photitos2016/iStockphoto
I fondly remember a time when I didn’t write about inflation every day. It would be good to get back to that, but today is not the day. The U.S. consumer price inflation data for September is with us. With it, I will say tentatively, the debate over whether the current dose of inflation is merely transitory is almost at an end. There’s room for much argument about what should be done about rising prices, but there’s no longer any sensible way to dismiss this inflation episode as merely transitory.
As is customary on these occasions, I will try to illustrate this for you with some charts ... lots of charts. Let’s start with the only inflation numbers most of us used to look at: the headline and core (excluding food and fuel) measures of CPI. Here they are, for the last decade: