Justin Fox, Columnist

How Inflation Can Be Both 0% and 8.5% at the Same Time

Consumer prices didn’t rise in July. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not rising.

August 15, 2022 at 3:19 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

Is inflation now 0%?
Photographer: Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images

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Last week a government agency put out a news release that attracted a lot of attention. It began:

The BLS always reports the monthly change first in these inflation reports (or at least it has since 1994, which is how far back its news release archive goes), but it’s the 12-month change that tends to get cited most in the media and in political discourse. So when President Joe Biden and others in his administration chose to emphasize what Biden called “July’s 0% inflation,” he got a lot of blowback on that narrow but in this case informative slice of the national discourse that is Twitter.