Inflation (CPI)
« Previous EntriesSchiff: The Fed is Pushing Oil Prices Higher
Monday, April 25th, 2011I was going through my email and found a link to this interesting interview with Peter Schiff, author of one of my favorite books from last year, How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes*. I thought this question and answer was interesting: Question: So, with a more thoughtful and sober monetary policy from the [...]
CPI Quotes from Jeffrey Hirsch
Wednesday, April 20th, 2011From page 10 of Jeffrey Hirsch’s Super Boom: Why the Dow Jones Will Hit 38,820 and How You Can Profit From It* comes this quote regarding inflation: The U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has tweaked and manipulated the Consumer Price Index (CPI) so many times over the past 30 years or [...]
Links to the CPI Tables Going Back to 2000
Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011I have been spending some time the last couple of days, looking at the CPI reports. If you’ve never looked at one of these reports, I urge you to do so. They’re pretty interesting. I still can’t for the life of me figure out why the BLS groups Education and Communications together. Why not give [...]
An Interesting Inflation Graphic
Tuesday, February 22nd, 2011I found this link on facebook the other day. Check it out: CPI Categories Since 2000. From what I can tell, they got their numbers for college tuition from the BLS like I did. I’m not sure why their numbers are so much higher than mine are.
Why Does the CPI Put Education and Communication in the Same Category?
Monday, February 21st, 2011I was looking at the CPI numbers this morning and noticed something interesting. For some reason, the CPI puts education and communications together in the same category: I can think of one good reason to group the two together: to hide the inflation rate of education. To see what I mean, take a look at [...]
Is the CPI Overstating Inflation?
Monday, October 4th, 2010The following exerpts out of Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics come as a surprise to me because I had always assumed (from what I had read) that the CPI was understating inflation. Thomas Sowell says it differently: At the beginning of the twentieth century, the national output of the United States did not include any airplanes, [...]
What’s the “Real” Inflation Rate?
Monday, September 20th, 2010The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes the Consumer Price Index, which is the standard for tracking inflation. The way the CPI is calculated was altered in the early 1980s and again in the 1990s. A facebook friend of mine sent me a link to an interesting inflation chart that publishes an alternative inflation number based [...]
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