It’s easy to think of “inflation” as an abstract economic principle and forget that it has real impacts on real people.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell acknowledged the pain of price inflation during his press conference at the close of the December FOMC meeting.
“We understand very well that prices went up by a great deal, and people really feel that, and it’s prices of food and transportation and heating your home and things like that. So there’s tremendous pain in that burst of inflation that was very global.”
Powell did not admit that he and his fellow central bankers were largely responsible for that pain, although he took credit for bringing inflation down, saying, “Now we have inflation itself is way down — but people are still feeling high prices — and that is really what people are feeling.”
Yes, Jay. We are feeling those high prices — because they haven’t come down! In fact, they continue to rise, just not as quickly as they were last year.
I might note here that inflation is on purpose. Making prices rise and go up is a stated policy. They just don’t want prices to rise so fast that you notice.
Unfortunately for the powers that be, you’ve noticed.
Just how much have prices gone up?
According to the most recent Consumer Price Index (CPI) data, prices are up 2.7 percent in the last year. But those of us living in the real world know prices have gone up much more than that.
Joaquin Henault and Laura Williams recently highlighted the dollar’s loss of purchasing power using the “Big Mac” index.
Hellbound and Down 