Looking to mainstream general media on economic matters is usually going to land you with some skewed portrayals of reality, even in the event they're not resor

Looking to mainstream general media on economic matters is usually going to land you with some skewed portrayals of reality, even in the event they're not resorting to outright lies or inaccurate statements, either because they assume their audience won't understand, because THEY don't understand, or both. I find that at least resorting to something like Bloomberg or Reuters will get a little bit more context around the numbers that isn't completely bizarro, but there is still a pretty high noise:signal ratio there, especially as half of what comes out on the air is someone's projection going forward (think of it as a fairground full of fortune tellers all showing you how shiny their crystal ball is). I'd also point out that the figures are YoY (Year on Year) rather than monthly changes, but it seems that's been discussed ad nauseam here so elaboration shouldn't be necessary. The one thing I'll point out there is that this is normal across MOST rates unless otherwise stated (your 3 month CD isn't yielding 3% over the next 3 months, it's yielding an annualized rate of 3%, or roughly 0.75% on the principal over its lifetime. This avoids unnecessarily comparing apples to oranges, but can certainly mislead someone who isn't expecting this to be the way things are done.