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Comment by mywittyname | Hacker News Reader

The article is paywalled, so I looked at the BLS CPI data myself.

The 5.0% number is being driven by falling (plummeting? -6.8%) energy prices. Food is still up, at 8.5%, and all items excluding food and energy stands at 5.6%.

https://www.bls.gov/cpi/

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Energy is a leading indicator -- it moves the fastest and also is a cause of inflation in the other goods. Energy is a massive component in the price of food, so food prices should follow the price of energy in time.

And gas/oil is already headed back up.

Yeah, food and energy move a lot.

So a lot of people ignore food and energy. When you ignore them, it's called 'Core CPI' and tends to be a better indicator of long term trends.

Yeah I noticed that gas was getting pretty cheap, but supermarket runs were still getting more and more expensive. I've been buying luxury goods recently because they're so cheap, relatively, inflation hasn't hit things like Apple products nearly as hard.

I wonder how seasonal energy prices are. Seems intuitive that as winter abates and heating demand drops, energy prices would fall.

These are all seasonally adjusted numbers.

But we had a warmer than expected winter, meaning less demand on heating meaning lower energy prices.

Sounds reasonable to me. There are 2 outliers, and the rest are right around average.

Makes sense, and is even positive: food prices will probably fall soon as that part of the economy stabilizes post Ukraine invasion.

Energy could fall even MORE post Ukraine invasion if there is some kind of resolution!

Well that bodes well for future months, energy factors into everything, especially food, so that'll come down as well.

That’s exactly what the article says.

Like I said, it was paywalled for me. So I went ahead and did the courtesy of looking up the data directly from the source for others who are also paywalled.

IMHO, that's more ethical than bypassing the paywall restriction.

I find it super annoying that people link to the WSJ for articles like this, because they are paywalled, but more importantly the US government does a much better job at presenting this information to everyone: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm

since 2020 prices has risen 45+ %

Source for this? Going by inflation rates, even just food, it looks like we're at 20-25%. That's still a lot, but it isn't 50%.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/food-inflation#:~....

No, CPI since January 2020 is 17%.

Not according to the calculator on https://www.bls.gov/ where $100 in March 2020 is $116 in March 2023

Lumber alone is $380 now, about the level it was in 2019. I'm old enough to remember the gnashing of teeth on this forum when lumber prices were unsurprisingly super high in 2020 and how that meant inflation on everything was really high.

I assume the same people will be claiming the opposite now and that deflation is a major problem

Nobody predicts hyperdeflation.

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