Ask HN: What's your estimate for the real inflation number? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's your estimate for the real inflation number?

1 pointrhacker2 comments

I keep seeing references from official sources about inflation being at 8.5% YoY. Yet every person I speak to tells me a similar story that their typical grocery run went from $100 to $200 (or more)

Why are we struggling to just say inflation is 100%? I can't find a single item that I normally buy that isn't double the price it was last year.

Also the official numbers don't really mean anything for the general population. I would say that most people have a couple items in their life that they normally HAVE to buy that have quadrupled in price - whatever that may be - seems to have an effect of making them lose an additional $5,000 to $10,000 per year. Not sure how the gas prices are going to affect this.

Why are the officials refusing to just say it? We can't fix things if we hide under "good looking" numbers.

At first I thought it was me buying Tillamook cheese (for example) until I bought the store brand last week and realized it was the same damn price.

My only guess is the government switched pricing things at Safeway to pricing expired cheese and eggs at Dollar General or something.

>Why are we struggling to just say inflation is 100%? I can't find a single item that I normally buy that isn't double the price it was last year.

Fruit isn't labour or energy intensive. The cycle hasn't come around for them to have raised much at all yet.

>Why are the officials refusing to just say it? We can't fix things if we hide under "good looking" numbers.

Because it's highly political and those official's employment is subject to political whims.

I pulled the nominal pricing on various things that should be near instantly accounting for future inflation. Everything is up 30+% with a few exceptions.

Rice, cocoa, tea, banana, tobacco, wood, peanuts, and potassium chloride? These are probably more related to something else and not inflation.

There are a number of things which seem to be at the average around 8%.

If you average the averages. It comes to around 40%.

When I do so tinkering in a totally not scientific way like excluding the big drop in wood price that is dropping from peaks and the drops not related to inflation for example. It increases the average to about 47%.

What's super interesting. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/money-supply-m2

Look at the graph and project money supply using pre-2020 data and you'd expect it to be around 17-18 trillion for today. It's actually around 22 trillion. So probably around 20% higher than it ought to be.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/central-bank-bala...

There's another 4 trillion coming from covid spending. So there's the other 20%.

Now important to note. This isn't 40% overnight, like in how im checking. These things typically take a few years to adjust. So 8.5% inflation over 4 years is about 40%.

Everything for the most part checks out for a locked in ~40%. This assumes the central banks of the world instantly stop all the money printing and there's no new inflation coming. Which we all know isn't true.

The government's incentive to lie (regardless of which party is in power) is because if you upset consumer confidence (https://www.conference-board.org/topics/consumer-confidence) it will spook consumers into spending less...risking a recession...which will be...blamed on the government.

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