Hacker News Reader

Comment by BaconPackets | Hacker News Reader

It’s a strange article. Really focused around gas prices and little about food/home prices.

People can’t eat gas. The impact of a 5% to 10% increase in basic food prices is extreme on most income levels. Especially when you consider families with children.

View on HN

Gas is underneath the price of everything. And anecdotally, it seems to me like grocery prices have dropped a lot compared to 8-10 months ago. Back then, I remember over and over seeing the prices in the store and being dumbfounded. But now a lot more stuff seems back to a “normal” range. Seemed like once the supply chain crunch eased[0], prices dropped.

[0] https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/policy/gscpi#/interactiv...

It will be interesting to see how policy changes when oil prices do not drive so much of the economy

Well IIRC, the inflation Numbers exclude Gas Prices because if included, the rate would be much higher.

But the world runs on fuel, so if fuel prices rise, prices rise in all other items. Food has to get to the cities from the farm somehow.

That's why we need electric trucks/trains to break the dependence on fuel.

Inflation numbers tend to exclude gas because unlike most other things which tend to slowly rise in price, fuel costs are highly erratic. They are excluded because they add more noise than data.

From 2009 to 2010, the price of gas went up by 25%. From 2014 to 2015 it went down by 25%. Do you think the true rate of inflation is measured by either of those numbers.

> the inflation Numbers exclude Gas Prices

Technically the inflation numbers are posted both ways, including with and without “core energy” so everyone can see the effects either way.

You don't recall correctly. All the standard inflation numbers in the newspapers, economics papers, COL adjustments etc. include gas prices (as well as food prices). You're probably confused with "core inflation", which excludes food and energy prices, or some other special purpose measure. The Bureau of Labor Statistics which computes the official US inflation numbers publishes several of those. Core inflation in the US is pretty much only used by the Federal Reserve, as a crude form of smoothing rapid fluctuations (alternatives could be using trimmed means, or rolling averages).

Krugman explains it all fairly accessibly: https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/0...

They do not exclude gas prices. The Consumer Price Index, which is what most people pay attention to and to which this article refers, currently weights gasoline at 3.7% of the basket of goods it tracks.

https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/2021.htm

Core CPI, which is what the Fed typically uses, excludes food and energy.

Isn’t rising gas prices always given as an excuse for increases in almost everything else (food included) because things must be transported yadda yadda?

Food prices tend to correlate with gas, because of the high fossil fuel costs of production. This is, of course, a delayed reaction.

>The impact of a 5% to 10% increase in basic food prices

Is it that little? The stuff I buy seems to have gone up 20%+

I suspect my local supermarkets are raising prices partly because of inflation and partly to get fatter margins. Shopping for food on Amazon is sometimes cheaper!

I paid 7.20usd for a dozen eggs this morning. Massachusetts has a law regarding cage raised chickens but this was way far beyond what I was paying six months ago. 2 years ago it was 3-4 dollars a dozen. I remember being surprised when the local chicken growers started charging 5 dollars a dozen.

Gas has been the biggest inflation talking point this year

Reply on news.ycombinator.com