ECON 2020 Extra Credit

For February 17 The BLS released the CPI on Tuesday, and the PPI on Thursday. The PPI is the Producer Price Index. The CPI is prices you and I pay, the PPI is the prices our employers pay for the stuff we use on the job. The usual thinking is that changes in the PPI get passed on to consumers several months later, where they show up in the CPI. And ... it was up by a lot: 0.7% over the month, and 6.0% over the last year . The former is a little worse than expected. The latter rate has been dropping, but it's still probably 2-4 times higher than we'd like it to be. That's the way inflation works: when it's too high, it's too high for a while. We're going on about 2 years of this now. Keep the PPI in mind the next time you hear a politician or someone in the media say that inflation is easing up. Maybe a little, but the PPI isn't indicating that it's going to go away any time soon. For February 15 There are a ton of different measures of inflation, but the...

Since I moved the exam back by 1 week, only posts below here (January 30th or earlier) will potentially be sources of extra credit questions on Exam 1. For January 30th We get U.S. macroeconomic data from more than one source. Some comes from the BEA. Another big source is the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS.gov). We also get some from the Census Bureau (they don't just sit around for 10 years between each decennial population census). These agencies release many different measures of the inflation rate (used for different purposes). An important one, because it's used by policymakers in D.C., is the PCE. Measures of this are released at the same time as GDP. Last week's announcement showed a rate of 3.2%/year during 2022 IV. You can find this on FRED, although it might not be the top link in Google. Today it was the second one, and the codename for the data series is PCEPI. If you go there, it shows a graph in which the last couple of years of higher inflation are the ste...