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Of course! I've lazy posted about this for years. Obviously, the basket of goods a person uses has gone up wildly more than the official numbers suggest - just compare the prices of food now and in your childhood. When you normalize different categories or baskets with wage increases, hours worked and labor productivity, it gets especially bad. We have also had wildly inflationary policy for decades now, which must increase to service debt while we're in a commodity supercycle where molecules matter again.
I've some sympathy with this view, but it's a broader sort of criticism than "how is the economy doing year over year". If inflation figures are fake now, then they also were 4, 10, 20 and 30 years ago.
Yes.
Probably. What's even the difference between fake and wrong?
It's really hard to measure things or make conclusions from them. E.g. if this recent paper is true, modern neoclassical economics and DSGE models etc. are wrong (because tariffs have the opposite impact). I don't think we can really know. But we've had unmeasured endogenous money creation for a long time. Asset prices and credit cycles seem to drive the economy lately, but IDK how to incorporate those into some metric doing what inflation measurements should do.
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Unfortunately your previous post is nonsense.
Rent is included and 7.5% of the index. Owner occupied housing -- represented as owners equivalent rent -- is 25% of the index.
No, you just wildly misunderstood[1] my point and think I (or rather my company) am too lazy to understand basic metrics. I am saying that OER is bad and not correlated to actual housing costs. Neither mortgage and insurance payments nor differences in total purchasing vs. rental costs are captured (depending on the geography, renting can be twice or half as much as buying). BLS lags and assumes price increases are gradual such that the sampled month only shows 1/6 of the change but rental prices do not go up a few dollars per month but have big, occasional changes based on new tenants etc. (Yes, this should be smoothed and averaged out but... I am arguing that's not what's done here.) To be clear, I don't think housing is currently a big inflation driver e.g. the New Tenant index showed a much faster decline.
[1] fair, not like I effort post or think about word choice. I e.g. don't know why I focused on CPI vs. the others which I also have problems with. CPE's the only one with fed targets...
What I think, not to put too fine a point on it, is that you are claiming some sort of special expertise and knowledge you don't actually have in order to win an internet argument. It's one thing to not believe in the validity of the CPI or PCE or some other indicator. It's quite another to act as if there is some class of important people who are in the know about them being nonsense, and you are one of them. Particularly when you back that up with a rather confused notion of what's wrong with them.
Argument?
Burgers?
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