Code and data for The Economist's Big Mac index

Daily currency and stock data is practically free in most cases. Anyway, this is historical data and not real time. I don't think Reuters gives a fuck beyond your payment for downloading the data in the first place.

Now if you piped the real time API to somewhere else for a broadcast / simple multicast, Reuters may take issue with it.

In finance, the data is all public, and the algorithms are all secret. In oil, the data is all secret, and the algorithms are all public.

seems to for me

I think I'm general inflation indexes are now completely impossible to generalize because (a) inflation has been enormous in some locales and some sectors but (b) the relative price of goods is now so dependent on location.

That is, like you say, in a major city I'd expect a Big Mac to be only slightly more expensive, but I'd expect housing to be astronomical. But outside of probably like 10-15 major metros I'd expect housing to be flat if not negative in huge swaths of the US.

Things like this is why I'm wary of looking too deeply into "data infographics", especially if they're related to economic statistics. The numbers alone rarely tell the whole story. They're still good for getting the "MBA-level" 30k ft view.

It is easy to calculate. A gallon of milk today is essentially the same as a gallon of milk 100 years ago. Same with gasoline and cans of beans.

People actually in the field don't trust the CPI number as gospel. We all know its shortcomings. However, the CPI print does move the market, so while it is good to keep track of the real inflation number by our own methodologies (which generally involves a different weighing scheme since the real CPI already accounts for most consumer products), you hardly trade on it.

For example, people have been shouting that inflation has already screamed past the Federal Reserve's target (of 2%) if the weight to medicare costs was increased to reflect the true spending of an average consumer(i.e. medicare is a bigger % of expenses of the avg consumer than reflected by the CPI weight). However, the fed refutes that argument and says that its current measure isn't perfect but neither is the solution proposed.

Currently they are looking at something called the Stock Watson model to see if it provides a better gauge. So by no means is it a settled science.

>Why do people use CPI instead of labor

How would one differentiate real and nominal wage/salary increases?

>housing

Shelter expenditures presently constitute 33.2% of the CPI basket.

>housing or stock prices

Asset prices are only very loosely associated with inflation.

>On a similar note, why would anyone trust the federal reserve's numbers given how the federal reserve has lied in the past?

lol. (Also, BLS calculates CPI, not the Fed.)

CPI is computed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, not the Federal Reserve. As for why labor, housing, and stock prices aren’t included in the CPI, I would guess because: labor is sticky and are only indirectly related to consumption via pricing, housing is a durable good (people don’t buy it week to week nor does rent change with such frequency), and stock prices don’t affect consumption.

You could make the argument that a better inflation indicator could take these into account, but it wouldn’t be the CPI then.

Much of what people label as inflation is either what is better known as "Baumol cost disease", or instead the market-distorting effects of near-invisible tax-evading overseas billionaires searching for safe assets and trampling your property market in the process.