Skip to content

Inflationary pressures are easing

Carl Quintanilla of NBC News provides us with a sampling of charts from a recent JPMorgan report:

Of course, there's always this too:

The monthly change in CPI (i.e., velocity) peaked in January and has been easing off ever since. Likewise, although the monthly acceleration of CPI has been declining for nearly two years, the trendline crossed into negative territory in January.

If you use other measurements you get roughly the same results: inflation seems to have peaked in early 2022 and has been slowly softening ever since. The monthly data is volatile, but the trendline tells all.

22 thoughts on “Inflationary pressures are easing

  1. Salamander

    Somehow, this has got to be spun as "bad news for Joe Biden and the Democrats this fall." Along with gasoline prices hitting $3.18.9 today in Albuquerque today.

  2. golack

    Headline year over year numbers will still be high by current standards for some time....

    Gas is not as much of an issue as it has been, but anything above $3/gallon annoys people.

    Food prices. Egg prices dipped a bit in June, then went back up in July. There one of a number of pressure points, so to speak, where people really see/feel the effects on inflation.

    Housing costs. It's not just the headline price, but the price of paying off the mortgage. Another pressure point.

  3. Justin

    gasoline popped up off the bottom late this week here in Michigan. Meanwhile, I'm keeping my grocery store receipts just to see how much my milk, eggs, chicken, bread, etc. change over time. Since I'm rich, if milk gets expensive, I'll switch to wine.

      1. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

        I do too.

        So much so, I drank two Hamm's with dinner tonite. From the land of skyblue mother fucking waters.

        (Also: my G. Heilmann selling grandfather had a bunch of Hamm's schwag, when I was a lad.)

        1. ScentOfViolets

          Hamms, Miller, et. al. are in the parlance of my circle, 'lawn mower beer'. The beer you down all at one go straight from the fridge after mowing your south-facing back yard at three in the pm during the last week of July.

  4. raoul

    Looks like Team Transitory is beating Team Permanent pretty easily but we all knew that $100+ per oil barrel was unsustainable- right?

  5. golack

    Ok,,, schools in Texas have to portray posters of "In God we Trust" now (all others pay cash?)...what kind of pressure is that?

    1. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

      Wait til some smartass band teacher, raised in the 80s & 90s on RUSH, Dream Theater, Kronos Quartet, TOOL, & various Mike Patton projects, puts up a Lemmy is God poster in the orchestra room.

    2. Salamander

      Well, in compensation, a law the Texas Lege (motto: keeping the village idiots in Austin for a spell" ) passed this year regarding "parental discomfort", I think, has resulted in the Bible being banned from school libraries.

      Honestly, if students and parents can ban the teaching of anything that gives them "discomfort", all mathematics are dead, forget history, tear up litrichure, banish science, and just be content with your kids growing up dumb as a box of rocks.

  6. D_Ohrk_E1

    In less than two years, we're going to be back at the ZLB and I'm going to be here blaming Boomers. Put it down on a piece of paper.

  7. NealB

    Dean Baker's got a piece up that explains where we're at now with inflation, and it's an excellent overview: https://cepr.net/inflation-where-are-we-now/.

    The trick with inflation is that everyone expects it to get worse, so it does. The Fed could be smart on this by leaving short-term interest rates alone, like Baker says at the end of his piece. At 2.5%, it's not causing too many problems. Spiking it up to 5% or higher surely will. Leaving the prime rate alone would send a direct signal that inflation is subsiding and contradict the expectation that it's going to get worse, so it won't. (It's odd that the geniuses on the Fed aren't thinking more clearly about this.)

    1. Vog46

      Neal-
      "At 2.5%, it's not causing too many problems. Spiking it up to 5% or higher surely will"

      What measure are you using for the "problems"????
      Is it unemployment? We are way above "full employment" now.
      And of course the problem with employment is that over time there will be more and more people demanding services and less and less people being available to provide those services (unless we really open our borders).
      Our economy is now hooked on low interest rates.
      5% unemployment used to be OK now it's a failure !
      We need to use debt and credit like it was intended to be used - sparingly at all levels - from the poor folks flipping burgers to multi-billion dollar companies. Paid off early too.
      Now, if we don't have easy credit our economy is doing poorly!! We need to reign that in a bit.

Comments are closed.