Well the prices I see around me are up a lot more than 2.6%.
My latest sticker shock was at Lowe's.-
My latest sticker shock was at Lowe's.-
https://www.forbes.com/sites/perianneboring/2014/02/03/if-yo... with-the-cpi/
And this article is 7 years old, I can't imagine Perianne's reaction to the current M2 money supply of 20 trillion, almost double the 10 trillion when she wrote it in 2014.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
Seems like yet another example of Goodhart's Law. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
I own many homes, I see their value go up much more than 2.6%. Yes anecdotal but it is very obvious to anyone that has tried to buy anything recently.
They have been doing no such thing. They have not put any effort into "calculating" anything. They simply take the official BLS and add a constant. They say so themselves:
> Responding to prior criticisms made by economist James Hamilton, John Williams explained in a private phone call that Shadowstats does not actually recalculate BLS data, rather, the Shadowstats CPI merely adds a constant to the officially reported numbers.[25]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadowstats.com
The number at that site will always be higher than the BLS number because the people who run that site think it should be higher. They publish no methodology to recreate their number. Whereas if you want to look at what BLS is doing you can download code:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Billion_Prices_project
Also, the official Shadowstats.com report costs $175 today (2021-05-11). However:
> Shadowstats doesn’t come cheap: currently, an annual subscription costs $175.
> Six years ago, an annual subscription cost … $175.
* https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/25/another-alterna...
$175. Huh. Where's that inflation?
And velocity (V) has dropped off a cliff:
* https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply#Link_with_inflati...
While amusing anecdata, your picture of a copper cable price is an indication of not much:
> Well, booming economies often run into temporary bottlenecks, which show up in surging prices for selected goods. For example, the price of copper tripled between December 2008 and February 2011, even though recovery from the 2008 recession was fairly sluggish.
* https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/06/opinion/us-inflation-fede...
For a history of copper prices see:
* https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCOPPUSDM
If you look up the inflation rate 2008-2011 you'll find it was nothing to write home about.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
HN threads are conversations. Anecdotes are the life blood of conversation. This is just people being human, as they should be.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...