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Comment by nrclark | Hacker News Reader

This isn't very surprising. Typical US economic policy aims for 2-3% annual inflation. That counter shows an average 2.6% inflation across 26 years, which is kind of right in the range we'd expect.

It's debatable whether this is good longterm policy - but it's been the norm in the US for decades.

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This ticker's current speed is faster than that, though. It's going about 1e-9 dollar per second. That comes to about $0.03 per year, which as a fraction of the current base of $0.50, comes to 6% inflation per year.

I don't know how that speed was determined. Either it's using a linear decrease since 2000 (which isn't correct, the inverse of exponential inflation would be logarithmic decay, not linear), or it's weighting by recency for the high inflation since 2020 (which may continue, or may not.)

Good eye. The ticker was using the observed rate of change over the two most recent data points, so it's actually biased towards the most recent inflation numbers. I've updated it to simply use the slope between the oldest (January 2000) and the most recent data.

It won't be 100% accurate, but it's close enough to create a visual. And the number is always updated monthly with real data anyways.

Nice job, thoughtful execution

> Typical US economic policy aims for 2-3% annual inflation. That counter shows an average 2.6% inflation across 26 years, which is kind of right in the range we'd expect

We aim for "inflation of 2 percent over the longer run, as measured by the annual change in the price index for personal consumption expenditures" [1].

[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/economy_14400.htm

Accurately aiming inflation as a central bank is like trying to keep a deflating balloon the same size using a harmonica. 2.6% isn’t bad, I don’t know that many if any central banks have managed a tighter band.

> "as measured by the annual change in the price index for personal consumption expenditures"

How closely does that track with CPI-U, which is the index this web site is using? If I believe Gemini, PCE should show a slightly lower inflation number?

It also says nothing of where that dollar has been in 20 years

Probably down the back of a sofa.

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