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US Consumer Price Index up 4.2%

275 points by ortusdux 4mo ago

bjourne 4mo ago
Regressive consumer tax due to tariffs?
- Ancalagon 4mo ago
  And gas prices
- AnimalMuppet 4mo ago
  That was months ago. These days it's more likely to be from the Iran war and the Strait of Hormuz being closed, and what that did to energy prices.
  - advisedwang 4mo ago
    The Iran war is for sure a huge part of that (just look at the energy cost inflation!), but other elements are a factor too. "Months ago" is really not that long when it comes to inflation.
- jghn 4mo ago
  Regressive consumer tax due to going to war with a country for no real reason
  - ortusdux 4mo ago
    Shipping container rates were starting to stabilize, but the issues with the Straight have caused a 80%+ increase in the last few months. https://www.drewry.co.uk/supply-chain-advisors/supply-chain-expertise/world-container-index-assessed-by-drewry https://www.drewry.co.uk/supply-chain-advisors/supply-chain-...
    - Terr_ 4mo ago
      > Shipping container rates With respect to those numbers, I remember this recent accusation of price-fixing across 2019-2021 [0] that might have an effect, although I also have reservations about how much to trust anything coming out of the rotting US Department of PresidentsPersonalLawyers these days. [0] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/four-worlds-largest-container-manufacturing-companies-and-seven-their-executives-indicted https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/four-worlds-largest-container...
  - alexashka 4mo ago
    'No real reason' is the 2026 version of 'they hate our freedom'.
tananaev 4mo ago
All of the increase is from energy. Oil prices.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- AnodicElegy 4mo ago
  It's not just due to energy, at least not directly. Core CPI (ex-food and energy) has been increasing monotonically since February: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPILFENS# https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPILFENS#
- advisedwang 4mo ago
  Per the link, food is up 3.1% and everything else 2.9%. So energy pulled inflation up from about 3% to about 4%, but that's not "all of the increase"
  - usrnm 4mo ago
    Energy going up drives evrything up, including food. Everything we do depends on energy in many different ways.
    - advisedwang 4mo ago
      It's possible for energy to be behind the rises in other cost, but the data presented here gives no evidence for or against that possibility.
      - usrnm 4mo ago
        It obviously is part of the rises in other cost. We can argue how large a part, but I cannot imagine a world where they are unrelated
  - gruez 4mo ago
    >Per the link, food is up 3.1% But if you look at the sibling comment, all of that came from "Food away from home ". In other words, it's all because of takeout/restaurants, not groceries. Those were actually dragging inflation down.
bluGill 4mo ago
Remember this next time you get your yearly review/raise. 4.2% is what you need to stay even, anything less is a pay cut.
- furyofantares 4mo ago
  Many people here make more than they spend, and this is simply inaccurate when that's the case. edit: I've explained how this works in a reply below.
  - pishpash 4mo ago
    No. What isn't spent now is future spending. You are still getting less.
  - jayd16 4mo ago
    It's still a cut in purchasing power even if you aren't hurting. But if you don't mind, I'll take 4.2% from your pay.
  - bauldursdev 4mo ago
    No, it's like, if you could buy 100 things before, but you can only buy 96 things now, then you have accumulated less value :D
  - dag100 4mo ago
    How is it inaccurate? If I only care about buying apples, and apples get 10% more expensive, and my salary only increases by 5%, then I can't buy as many apples as I could have before. How many apples I do actually buy in the end is irrelevant to the calculation.
    - sowbug 4mo ago
      The person you're replying to erroneously interpreted "stay even" as "avoid going into debt," instead of your income's purchasing power remaining constant.
    - furyofantares 4mo ago
23ahgfqa 4mo ago
The Iran conflict will continue on a low flame (occasional pinpricks like now) forever. It serves the US Energy Dominance Agenda against China, Japan, India and the EU. The Trump administration does not care about "its" population. There were already rumors early in the Trump term that Trump would not mind a recession so that his real estate cronies could buy cheap foreclosures. So it is all a double win for the oligarchs. The stock market is still fine, nothing else matters.
- tharmas 4mo ago
  Absolutely hard Agree here. Thank you.
- adithyareddy 4mo ago
  If this ends up being the case, 15 years from now we might look back at this as the catalyst for supercharging the energy transition across the world ex-US.
  - sriacha 4mo ago
    Might be wishful thinking, but I see this as the silver lining of the conflict
    - JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
      > I see this as the silver lining of the conflict From what I can tell it’s also supercharging coal, particularly in Asia, e.g. India investing in coal gasification infrastructure [1]. [1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/india-clears-4-billion-plan-boost-gas-production-coal-2026-05-13/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/india-clears-4-billi...
- JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
  > It serves the US Energy Dominance Agenda against China, Japan, India and the EU …how? What is this agenda? Juicing short-term energy exports? That’s not a “dominance agenda.”
FrustratedMonky 4mo ago
[flagged]
compumike 4mo ago
Here are some N-year rolling total inflation charts to put this datapoint in a longer-term perspective: https://totalrealreturns.com/inflation https://totalrealreturns.com/inflation . Zooming out always smooths the noise.
- searine 4mo ago
  Simple, excellent data. Thanks.
- listless 4mo ago
  This is so good Ty. Basically, looking at inflation over time, we look pretty good here.
  - jasondigitized 4mo ago
    Against what other metric? Income? Stock Market? Debt?
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- tclancy 4mo ago
  I am not sure what the perspective is: we aren't the same economy (there are true financial system differences between now and say, 1985) and, even if we were the same, the three other shocks that rise like this are two world wars and an oil crisis. This is some dunderding old narcissist thinking he's the toughest kid on the block. You could argue the oil crisis was a similar result of the US never, ever learning a lesson about intervening in others' political systems (especially if there's oil involved), but trend line or not, no one had to go through this. And the trend line would bend differently if we could just learn the lesson.
  - tclancy 4mo ago
    And yes I am oversimplifying: the current conditions are actually do to a number of stupid things the current administration did because they assumed everyone who came before them was stupid and woke, but this just strikes me wrong, as though the chart should be comfort to someone struggling to make rent or pay for medicine or what have you. Much of this could have been avoided.
ortusdux 4mo ago
The worst part of this report is my diminished faith in the numbers.
- AnimalMuppet 4mo ago
  Could you explain? What about this report pushes you toward not believing the numbers?
  - aaomidi 4mo ago
    It’s not this report specifically but the other stuff the admin has done with the BLS.
    - bigstrat2003 4mo ago
      It's unfortunately not limited to the current administration. We've had the government telling us to not trust our lying eyes about inflation at least since the Biden administration. At the time government officials were reassuring everyone that there wasn't inflation while everyone could see the prices going up everywhere.
      - aaomidi 4mo ago
        BLS was not gutted then. I have no love for Biden. I didn’t vote for him/kamala in the last election. However I can also recognize that these two are not the same situation.
  - miltonlost 4mo ago
    Not so much THIS report, but you can't trust any data that the Trump administration puts out after all the blantant corruption. Remember the Sharpie on the hurricane chart?
  - ortusdux 4mo ago
    It's more the messenger than the message. Or in this case the people funding and staffing the messenger, and who desperately need this number to be as low as possible.
mjamesaustin 4mo ago
Prices have doubled since 1999!? Restaurant prices near me have doubled since 2015, easily. And that's not counting delivery going from free to 25% of the meal cost.
- win311fwg 4mo ago
  Not quite. The value of the currency has declined by 33% since 1999. Prices are subject to the combination of the value of the currency and the value of the good. Food may be worth more than in the past, for example, so you cannot look at the value of the currency alone.
  - Dylan16807 4mo ago
    Food is one of the things that's going to have the least change in value.
    - win311fwg 4mo ago
      Quite the opposite. Value is essentially a function of scarcity relative to desire. Food desire may be, for all intents and purposes, stable, but availability is most certainly not. Something like a major weather event wiping out a crop can quickly change the scarcity profile. Food is especially prone to value variances over time.
      - Dylan16807 4mo ago
        What specific definition of value are you using here? Sometimes terms with value get into the same realm as price, but the default definition of value is the benefit you're getting, and going to similar restaurants ten years apart is damn near the same benefit. Scarcity doesn't come into play.
        win311fwg 4mo ago
        Given that we're specifically talking about value in the context of currency and how that pertains to CPI, I am not sure where "benefit you're getting" would apply. CPI is definitely not interested in "the benefit you got". However, if we are to change gears, the benefit you get out of a restaurant isn't constant either. Aside from maybe those trying to serve the elderly population, where there seems to be a viable niche of providing "remembrance of how things were in the good old days", restaurants that try to offer constant value quickly go out of business. They are forever needing to up their game to appeal to the typical clientele. Customers want increasingly more benefit as time marches forward to justify the visit. An individual's perception of benefit is personal, so it is true that any given individual may not find increased benefit in restaurants trying to outdo each other by offering more and more benefits, but within populations it seems quite apparent that restaurants that "win" generally are offering more benefits (higher quality/more exotic/creative food, increasingly sophisticated ambiance, etc.) than they did in the past.
JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
Up 4.2% (2.9% core, i.e. stripping out food and energy) over the last 12 months before seasonal adjustment. The higher-frequency data are more concerning. CPI “increased 0.5 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis in May, after rising 0.6 percent in April” and 0.9 percent in March [1]. (0.3, 0.2, 0.3 percent for December, January, February, respectively.) So a linear trend of 6% from March, closer to 9% if one extrapolates the March-April-May quarter. Almost all of that driven by food and energy. Core spiked to 0.4% MoM in April, but calmed down to 0.2% in May, on trend with pre-war numbers. It’s up 2.9% YoY, but trending a bit lower. (Looked at another way, we’ve already “booked” 2.5% of inflation for ‘26. If we continue at 0.5% MoM, we close the year +5.6%. Even if it drops to pre-war 0.2%, we’re still going to be +3.8%. Given the resumption of hostilities, I’m betting we’ll be closer to the former.) Together with the jobs numbers, it would be weird for an independent Fed to not raise rates. [1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm
- nonethewiser 4mo ago
  > Together with the jobs numbers, it would be weird for an independent Fed to not raise rates. Not really. They may believe the inflation is driven by supply shocks, not excess demand. For example, the oil blockade. Raising already restrictive rates wont increase the supply of oil. They don't even need to be right. If they simply believe this is what's driving inflation, they could decline to raise rates without that necessarily indicating a lack of independence. Personally I expect the FED not to be independent and to let inflation run a little hot while lowering rates to attack the debt from 2 angles. But even still, its not true that high CPI + not lowering rates = non-independent fed
  - JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
    > They may believe the inflation is driven by supply shocks, not excess demand Fair enough, I regret my edit. It would be unusualy for the Fed not to hold or raise rates. Lowering rates, on the other hand, would be a clear WTF move.
altairprime 4mo ago
U.S. consumer wages index down -1% this past three months. also. We almost briefly started climbing positive in January, but nope, another 1% drop, sigh. See also the +25% inflation / -1.2% net wages after inflation over five years chart here, for those unfamiliar with how inflation % press releases are misleading over time. If household spending power is -1% after +4% inflation, then that inflation probably isn’t healthy for your country’s economic future, etc. https://www.statista.com/chart/32428/inflation-and-wage-growth-in-the-united-states/ https://www.statista.com/chart/32428/inflation-and-wage-grow... (I also suspect the wage index itself is disguising about the total wages paid index dropping like a stone, but haven’t done the math to chart it yet myself yet.)
jbverschoor 4mo ago
Is this with the new method of counting what inflation means? (trimmed mean, without outliers)
- impure 4mo ago
  No, the new method of inflation that Kevin Warsh likes is the trimmed mean which is 2.8%.
bs7280 4mo ago
Remember this is the number the Government is measuring and reporting. The "real" inflation that every day people feel in their wallet is significantly higher.
- jakobnissen 4mo ago
  Why is the government measured inflation not the same as real inflation?
  - JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
    Because people can’t internalize regional variance. So since the beginning of time, it’s not noticed when the national number is higher and fraud when it’s lower.
    - jazzpush2 4mo ago
      Ah, you're right. A broad, contrarian dismissal is exactly the way you should respond in any conversation related to CPI/inflation. By the way, that coffee is $9. Sorry, Brazil tariffs and everything else - you understand.
      - JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
        There are legitimate complaints with CPI. The Reddit variety is mostly statistical illiteracy. > that coffee is $9 Lots of coffee data [1]. One I think tracks a cup in a city is up 17% YoY. [1] https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/APU0000717311&series_id=CUUR0000SEFP01&series_id=CUUR0000SS17031&series_id=CUUR0000SS17032 https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/APU0000717311&series_id=CUUR...
      - BobaFloutist 4mo ago
        I think a broad, contrarian dismissal of a broad, contrarian dismissal of a metric is, while unhelpful, not inappropriate.
  - eatsyourtacos 4mo ago
dw_arthur 4mo ago
Paradoxically, inflation has contributed to me taking a sabbatical. While I live in a LCOL area and made ~140k/year it just no longer felt worth it to work as I saw my retirement accounts start to match and exceed my salary in yearly gains. I do plan on going back to work in a part time manner, but inflation has killed any reason for me to work hard at a job for that level of salary. Furthermore, the feeling of "what's the point" around white collar work has never been more intense.
- ZeWaka 4mo ago
  Are you assuming yearly wages not increasing to match/exceed inflation every year? The logical point here doesn't make much sense to me otherwise.
  - kennywinker 4mo ago
    Cumulative inflation since 2019 has been 30%. More with these new numbers, I think. What jobs have the wages gone up 30% in that same time period? I’m sure a few, but not many.
    - thewebguyd 4mo ago
      I'd say almost no one gets a 30%+ increase staying in the same company. There was a short period between 2019 and ~2022 when tech was hiring like crazy and you could just hop from job to job for huge increases every 6 months to a year. The problem is that is now over, and so wages are back to being suppressed again.
    - em500 4mo ago
      Hourly wage for all private sector workers is up +32% since Dec 2019 ($37.54 vs $28.38)[1]. For non-management workers +35% ($32.31 in May 2026 vs $23.85 in Dec 2019)[2]. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES0500000003 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES0500000003 [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AHETPI https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AHETPI
  - rottencupcakes 4mo ago
jmyeet 4mo ago
Worse is coming and the markets seem to be in complete denial about it. Oil has only really maintained the ~$100/barrel price because of record SPR releases worldwide. Also, that $100 price is kinda fake because it's a future price. The spot prices got much higher. Well, that runway is coming to an end. If the Strait of Hormuz re-opened today , we'd still be facing an energy shock. Plus there's famine coming. Now the US won't run out of oil or refined petroleum products. The uS is now a net exporter. But it's a global marekt so the prices are going to go way up. And some countries and heavily dependent on oil for electricity. They are going to face blackouts. So even though fertilizer shortages are skewed towards the Global South, food prices too are global so they're going up too. In 1973, the energy shock took ~6 months to manifest [1]. But I think the real problem is dynamic pricing. Inflation is insidious. People start raising prices on the expectation of rising prices, thus causing prices to rise. But so many industries now are going well beyond that by essentially colluding through AI tools (eg RealPage) to further raise prices. I honestly don't know how this ends without a deep, long recession. [1]: https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/oil-crises-past-and-possibly-future https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/oil-crises-past-and-possi...
- JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
  > don't know how this ends without a deep, long recession The same way Powell ended the last one without a deep, long recession.
  - jmyeet 4mo ago
    You mean with the greatest wealth transfer to the wealthy in history that added a quarter to our entire national debt? Yeah, you can't do that often. The US national debt is about to hit $40 trillion. It was $20 trillion 9 years ago. What Trump and Biden should've done is implemented a windfall profits tax of probably 80%. But there's absolutely zero chance of that happening by either party.
    - JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
      > mean with the greatest wealth transfer to the wealthy in history that added a quarter to our entire national debt? The national debt was added before the inflation took hold to counter the Covid recession. (When the MMT nutters were at the helm.) Powell cured the resulting inflation without causing a recession. He did that without adding anything to our national debt. > What Trump and Biden should've done is implemented a windfall profits tax of probably 80% This just creates a political game of defining what is and isn't a windfall. A progressive corporate tax achieves what I think you want to without the side effects. Either way, the playbook for getting out of this is steeply increasing rates and then moderating them before inflation hits target.
ransom1538 4mo ago
Take on debt, as much as possible. Otherwise, inflation will end all. Inflation eats debt.
ck2 4mo ago
considering Iran War is likely to still be happening January 2029, imagine what costs will be like by then every single day $5/gas is taking a BILLION dollars out of the economy that could have gone elsewhere but it could be worse, we could be innocent civilian Iranians having the US bomb their water and power plants this week
bilsbie 4mo ago
I find it interesting how many people act like inflation doesn’t exist especially with salaries. If you made 100k in say 2000 the equivalent would be 200k today. If you go by median house price your salary should have doubled since 2015!
khriss 4mo ago
The worst part is that the 4.2% number is a floor on the actual inflation numbers. The US CPI has been lagging retail inflation for quite some time now (see 'hedonic regressions' by the BLS).
- nonethewiser 4mo ago
  Yeah it's been gamed for a long time. Did you know teh inflation metric can actually go down when staples it tracks goes up? Yup. If steak is tracked and it doubles in price, they can adjust the basket weights to reflect what they assume consumers will do: buy less beef and more chicken instead. So if Q1 steak=10 and Q2 steak=20 they might change the weights so that it's essential comparing Q1 steak to Q2 chicken. Which may be cheaper than Q1 steak, thus reducing inflation despite steak doubling in price.
  - jfengel 4mo ago
    That doesn't strike me as a problem. It models what consumers actually do. The consumers are still being fed and they're suffering only a minor loss in their preference. They don't keep any kind of hedonic measure, which might be interesting. If a consumer would rather have steak, but switches to chicken when it's over $10/pound, and then switches to tofu when chicken hits $10/pound, they're considerably less happy even if they're reasonably well fed. You could probably use that to calculate some kind of hedonic metric: "I was originally willing to pay only $1/lb for tofu because it brought me 20% of the pleasure that a $5 steak would have." But you're not 80% less happy overall, since food is only part of your total happiness, so you'd need a "basket" of happiness.
    - Tadpole9181 4mo ago
      What? No. How in the world would that be an honest reflection of economic health? Even in your ideal scenario, if they switch to chicken. Compare the old price and new price of the chicken. Under your model, if people stop buying toilet paper, there's a 100% REDUCTION in the price of toilet paper in the model. The economy must be great! And, what, do we only want to care that food got more expensive the moment people are starving to death or eating pagpag to survive?
lanewinfield 4mo ago
https://50centadjustedforinflation.com/ https://50centadjustedforinflation.com/ 50 Cent is up 1 cent to 113 Cent.
Balgair 4mo ago
Serious question here: Can we trust these numbers out of this admin? I've not been super plugged into the latest news out of the BLS, but I seem to remember a lot of political firings in the 'econ' part of the government. I do not mean to be glib here either or start a flame war. I am genuinely asking.
- tencentshill 4mo ago
  It's currently headed by a pretty by-the-books guy, after a series of trump loyalists were rejected. Next up for nomination is another boring career professional, who actually pushed back against trumps bullshit and survived. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-nominee-head-bls-supports-statistical-agencys-independence-integrity-2026-06-10/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-nominee-head-bls-supp...
  - Balgair 4mo ago
    Whew! thank you!
Blackstrat 4mo ago
This is not inflation. The is a supply and demand issue. There are two factors: increasing energy costs due to the season and the rising costs of AI data centers (a big impact in my area). And secondly, the disruption of the oil supply during the continued Middle East conflict. These two issues have caused an energy price spike. Yes, it will eventually result in wide spread costs. But, as the components in the above report indicate, it is not yet spread widely. We are all sensitive to gas price fluctuations. We'd all be better off if we admitted that alternative fuels, other than nuclear, will never provide the requisite energy required to advance civilization. It's time to quit pretending that it will and start building nuclear power plants. Wind and solar farms are not the answer. And end the Iraq war aggressively. It's been nearly 50 years and it's clear that Iraq will never negotiate honestly. So Trump and his allies need to stop pretending and end it. And the same applies to the Ukraine-Russia conflict - no more US tax dollars to the Ukrainian dictator.

275 points by ortusdux 4mo ago

bjourne 4mo ago

Regressive consumer tax due to tariffs?

Ancalagon 4mo ago
And gas prices
AnimalMuppet 4mo ago
That was months ago. These days it's more likely to be from the Iran war and the Strait of Hormuz being closed, and what that did to energy prices.
- advisedwang 4mo ago
  The Iran war is for sure a huge part of that (just look at the energy cost inflation!), but other elements are a factor too. "Months ago" is really not that long when it comes to inflation.
jghn 4mo ago
Regressive consumer tax due to going to war with a country for no real reason
- ortusdux 4mo ago
  Shipping container rates were starting to stabilize, but the issues with the Straight have caused a 80%+ increase in the last few months. https://www.drewry.co.uk/supply-chain-advisors/supply-chain-expertise/world-container-index-assessed-by-drewry https://www.drewry.co.uk/supply-chain-advisors/supply-chain-...
  - Terr_ 4mo ago
    > Shipping container rates With respect to those numbers, I remember this recent accusation of price-fixing across 2019-2021 [0] that might have an effect, although I also have reservations about how much to trust anything coming out of the rotting US Department of PresidentsPersonalLawyers these days. [0] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/four-worlds-largest-container-manufacturing-companies-and-seven-their-executives-indicted https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/four-worlds-largest-container...
- alexashka 4mo ago
  'No real reason' is the 2026 version of 'they hate our freedom'.

tananaev 4mo ago

All of the increase is from energy. Oil prices.

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
AnodicElegy 4mo ago
It's not just due to energy, at least not directly. Core CPI (ex-food and energy) has been increasing monotonically since February: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPILFENS# https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPILFENS#
advisedwang 4mo ago
Per the link, food is up 3.1% and everything else 2.9%. So energy pulled inflation up from about 3% to about 4%, but that's not "all of the increase"
- usrnm 4mo ago
  Energy going up drives evrything up, including food. Everything we do depends on energy in many different ways.
  - advisedwang 4mo ago
    It's possible for energy to be behind the rises in other cost, but the data presented here gives no evidence for or against that possibility.
    - usrnm 4mo ago
      It obviously is part of the rises in other cost. We can argue how large a part, but I cannot imagine a world where they are unrelated
- gruez 4mo ago
  >Per the link, food is up 3.1% But if you look at the sibling comment, all of that came from "Food away from home ". In other words, it's all because of takeout/restaurants, not groceries. Those were actually dragging inflation down.

bluGill 4mo ago

Remember this next time you get your yearly review/raise. 4.2% is what you need to stay even, anything less is a pay cut.

furyofantares 4mo ago
Many people here make more than they spend, and this is simply inaccurate when that's the case. edit: I've explained how this works in a reply below.
- pishpash 4mo ago
  No. What isn't spent now is future spending. You are still getting less.
- jayd16 4mo ago
  It's still a cut in purchasing power even if you aren't hurting. But if you don't mind, I'll take 4.2% from your pay.
- bauldursdev 4mo ago
  No, it's like, if you could buy 100 things before, but you can only buy 96 things now, then you have accumulated less value :D
- dag100 4mo ago
  How is it inaccurate? If I only care about buying apples, and apples get 10% more expensive, and my salary only increases by 5%, then I can't buy as many apples as I could have before. How many apples I do actually buy in the end is irrelevant to the calculation.
  - sowbug 4mo ago
    The person you're replying to erroneously interpreted "stay even" as "avoid going into debt," instead of your income's purchasing power remaining constant.
  - furyofantares 4mo ago

23ahgfqa 4mo ago

The Iran conflict will continue on a low flame (occasional pinpricks like now) forever. It serves the US Energy Dominance Agenda against China, Japan, India and the EU. The Trump administration does not care about "its" population. There were already rumors early in the Trump term that Trump would not mind a recession so that his real estate cronies could buy cheap foreclosures. So it is all a double win for the oligarchs. The stock market is still fine, nothing else matters.

tharmas 4mo ago
Absolutely hard Agree here. Thank you.
adithyareddy 4mo ago
If this ends up being the case, 15 years from now we might look back at this as the catalyst for supercharging the energy transition across the world ex-US.
- sriacha 4mo ago
  Might be wishful thinking, but I see this as the silver lining of the conflict
  - JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
    > I see this as the silver lining of the conflict From what I can tell it’s also supercharging coal, particularly in Asia, e.g. India investing in coal gasification infrastructure [1]. [1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/india-clears-4-billion-plan-boost-gas-production-coal-2026-05-13/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/india-clears-4-billi...
JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
> It serves the US Energy Dominance Agenda against China, Japan, India and the EU …how? What is this agenda? Juicing short-term energy exports? That’s not a “dominance agenda.”

FrustratedMonky 4mo ago

[flagged]

compumike 4mo ago

Here are some N-year rolling total inflation charts to put this datapoint in a longer-term perspective: https://totalrealreturns.com/inflation https://totalrealreturns.com/inflation . Zooming out always smooths the noise.

searine 4mo ago
Simple, excellent data. Thanks.
listless 4mo ago
This is so good Ty. Basically, looking at inflation over time, we look pretty good here.
- jasondigitized 4mo ago
  Against what other metric? Income? Stock Market? Debt?
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
tclancy 4mo ago
I am not sure what the perspective is: we aren't the same economy (there are true financial system differences between now and say, 1985) and, even if we were the same, the three other shocks that rise like this are two world wars and an oil crisis. This is some dunderding old narcissist thinking he's the toughest kid on the block. You could argue the oil crisis was a similar result of the US never, ever learning a lesson about intervening in others' political systems (especially if there's oil involved), but trend line or not, no one had to go through this. And the trend line would bend differently if we could just learn the lesson.
- tclancy 4mo ago
  And yes I am oversimplifying: the current conditions are actually do to a number of stupid things the current administration did because they assumed everyone who came before them was stupid and woke, but this just strikes me wrong, as though the chart should be comfort to someone struggling to make rent or pay for medicine or what have you. Much of this could have been avoided.

ortusdux 4mo ago

The worst part of this report is my diminished faith in the numbers.

AnimalMuppet 4mo ago
Could you explain? What about this report pushes you toward not believing the numbers?
- aaomidi 4mo ago
  It’s not this report specifically but the other stuff the admin has done with the BLS.
  - bigstrat2003 4mo ago
    It's unfortunately not limited to the current administration. We've had the government telling us to not trust our lying eyes about inflation at least since the Biden administration. At the time government officials were reassuring everyone that there wasn't inflation while everyone could see the prices going up everywhere.
    - aaomidi 4mo ago
      BLS was not gutted then. I have no love for Biden. I didn’t vote for him/kamala in the last election. However I can also recognize that these two are not the same situation.
- miltonlost 4mo ago
  Not so much THIS report, but you can't trust any data that the Trump administration puts out after all the blantant corruption. Remember the Sharpie on the hurricane chart?
- ortusdux 4mo ago
  It's more the messenger than the message. Or in this case the people funding and staffing the messenger, and who desperately need this number to be as low as possible.

mjamesaustin 4mo ago

Prices have doubled since 1999!? Restaurant prices near me have doubled since 2015, easily. And that's not counting delivery going from free to 25% of the meal cost.

win311fwg 4mo ago
Not quite. The value of the currency has declined by 33% since 1999. Prices are subject to the combination of the value of the currency and the value of the good. Food may be worth more than in the past, for example, so you cannot look at the value of the currency alone.
- Dylan16807 4mo ago
  Food is one of the things that's going to have the least change in value.
  - win311fwg 4mo ago
    Quite the opposite. Value is essentially a function of scarcity relative to desire. Food desire may be, for all intents and purposes, stable, but availability is most certainly not. Something like a major weather event wiping out a crop can quickly change the scarcity profile. Food is especially prone to value variances over time.
    - Dylan16807 4mo ago
      What specific definition of value are you using here? Sometimes terms with value get into the same realm as price, but the default definition of value is the benefit you're getting, and going to similar restaurants ten years apart is damn near the same benefit. Scarcity doesn't come into play.
      - win311fwg 4mo ago
        Given that we're specifically talking about value in the context of currency and how that pertains to CPI, I am not sure where "benefit you're getting" would apply. CPI is definitely not interested in "the benefit you got". However, if we are to change gears, the benefit you get out of a restaurant isn't constant either. Aside from maybe those trying to serve the elderly population, where there seems to be a viable niche of providing "remembrance of how things were in the good old days", restaurants that try to offer constant value quickly go out of business. They are forever needing to up their game to appeal to the typical clientele. Customers want increasingly more benefit as time marches forward to justify the visit. An individual's perception of benefit is personal, so it is true that any given individual may not find increased benefit in restaurants trying to outdo each other by offering more and more benefits, but within populations it seems quite apparent that restaurants that "win" generally are offering more benefits (higher quality/more exotic/creative food, increasingly sophisticated ambiance, etc.) than they did in the past.

JumpCrisscross 4mo ago

Up 4.2% (2.9% core, i.e. stripping out food and energy) over the last 12 months before seasonal adjustment. The higher-frequency data are more concerning. CPI “increased 0.5 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis in May, after rising 0.6 percent in April” and 0.9 percent in March [1]. (0.3, 0.2, 0.3 percent for December, January, February, respectively.) So a linear trend of 6% from March, closer to 9% if one extrapolates the March-April-May quarter. Almost all of that driven by food and energy. Core spiked to 0.4% MoM in April, but calmed down to 0.2% in May, on trend with pre-war numbers. It’s up 2.9% YoY, but trending a bit lower. (Looked at another way, we’ve already “booked” 2.5% of inflation for ‘26. If we continue at 0.5% MoM, we close the year +5.6%. Even if it drops to pre-war 0.2%, we’re still going to be +3.8%. Given the resumption of hostilities, I’m betting we’ll be closer to the former.) Together with the jobs numbers, it would be weird for an independent Fed to not raise rates. [1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm

nonethewiser 4mo ago
> Together with the jobs numbers, it would be weird for an independent Fed to not raise rates. Not really. They may believe the inflation is driven by supply shocks, not excess demand. For example, the oil blockade. Raising already restrictive rates wont increase the supply of oil. They don't even need to be right. If they simply believe this is what's driving inflation, they could decline to raise rates without that necessarily indicating a lack of independence. Personally I expect the FED not to be independent and to let inflation run a little hot while lowering rates to attack the debt from 2 angles. But even still, its not true that high CPI + not lowering rates = non-independent fed
- JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
  > They may believe the inflation is driven by supply shocks, not excess demand Fair enough, I regret my edit. It would be unusualy for the Fed not to hold or raise rates. Lowering rates, on the other hand, would be a clear WTF move.

altairprime 4mo ago

U.S. consumer wages index down -1% this past three months. also. We almost briefly started climbing positive in January, but nope, another 1% drop, sigh. See also the +25% inflation / -1.2% net wages after inflation over five years chart here, for those unfamiliar with how inflation % press releases are misleading over time. If household spending power is -1% after +4% inflation, then that inflation probably isn’t healthy for your country’s economic future, etc. https://www.statista.com/chart/32428/inflation-and-wage-growth-in-the-united-states/ https://www.statista.com/chart/32428/inflation-and-wage-grow... (I also suspect the wage index itself is disguising about the total wages paid index dropping like a stone, but haven’t done the math to chart it yet myself yet.)

jbverschoor 4mo ago

Is this with the new method of counting what inflation means? (trimmed mean, without outliers)

impure 4mo ago
No, the new method of inflation that Kevin Warsh likes is the trimmed mean which is 2.8%.

bs7280 4mo ago

Remember this is the number the Government is measuring and reporting. The "real" inflation that every day people feel in their wallet is significantly higher.

jakobnissen 4mo ago
Why is the government measured inflation not the same as real inflation?
- JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
  Because people can’t internalize regional variance. So since the beginning of time, it’s not noticed when the national number is higher and fraud when it’s lower.
  - jazzpush2 4mo ago
    Ah, you're right. A broad, contrarian dismissal is exactly the way you should respond in any conversation related to CPI/inflation. By the way, that coffee is $9. Sorry, Brazil tariffs and everything else - you understand.
    - JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
      There are legitimate complaints with CPI. The Reddit variety is mostly statistical illiteracy. > that coffee is $9 Lots of coffee data [1]. One I think tracks a cup in a city is up 17% YoY. [1] https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/APU0000717311&series_id=CUUR0000SEFP01&series_id=CUUR0000SS17031&series_id=CUUR0000SS17032 https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/APU0000717311&series_id=CUUR...
    - BobaFloutist 4mo ago
      I think a broad, contrarian dismissal of a broad, contrarian dismissal of a metric is, while unhelpful, not inappropriate.
- eatsyourtacos 4mo ago

dw_arthur 4mo ago

Paradoxically, inflation has contributed to me taking a sabbatical. While I live in a LCOL area and made ~140k/year it just no longer felt worth it to work as I saw my retirement accounts start to match and exceed my salary in yearly gains. I do plan on going back to work in a part time manner, but inflation has killed any reason for me to work hard at a job for that level of salary. Furthermore, the feeling of "what's the point" around white collar work has never been more intense.

ZeWaka 4mo ago
Are you assuming yearly wages not increasing to match/exceed inflation every year? The logical point here doesn't make much sense to me otherwise.
- kennywinker 4mo ago
  Cumulative inflation since 2019 has been 30%. More with these new numbers, I think. What jobs have the wages gone up 30% in that same time period? I’m sure a few, but not many.
  - thewebguyd 4mo ago
    I'd say almost no one gets a 30%+ increase staying in the same company. There was a short period between 2019 and ~2022 when tech was hiring like crazy and you could just hop from job to job for huge increases every 6 months to a year. The problem is that is now over, and so wages are back to being suppressed again.
  - em500 4mo ago
    Hourly wage for all private sector workers is up +32% since Dec 2019 ($37.54 vs $28.38)[1]. For non-management workers +35% ($32.31 in May 2026 vs $23.85 in Dec 2019)[2]. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES0500000003 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES0500000003 [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AHETPI https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AHETPI
- rottencupcakes 4mo ago

jmyeet 4mo ago

Worse is coming and the markets seem to be in complete denial about it. Oil has only really maintained the ~$100/barrel price because of record SPR releases worldwide. Also, that $100 price is kinda fake because it's a future price. The spot prices got much higher. Well, that runway is coming to an end. If the Strait of Hormuz re-opened today , we'd still be facing an energy shock. Plus there's famine coming. Now the US won't run out of oil or refined petroleum products. The uS is now a net exporter. But it's a global marekt so the prices are going to go way up. And some countries and heavily dependent on oil for electricity. They are going to face blackouts. So even though fertilizer shortages are skewed towards the Global South, food prices too are global so they're going up too. In 1973, the energy shock took ~6 months to manifest [1]. But I think the real problem is dynamic pricing. Inflation is insidious. People start raising prices on the expectation of rising prices, thus causing prices to rise. But so many industries now are going well beyond that by essentially colluding through AI tools (eg RealPage) to further raise prices. I honestly don't know how this ends without a deep, long recession. [1]: https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/oil-crises-past-and-possibly-future https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/oil-crises-past-and-possi...

JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
> don't know how this ends without a deep, long recession The same way Powell ended the last one without a deep, long recession.
- jmyeet 4mo ago
  You mean with the greatest wealth transfer to the wealthy in history that added a quarter to our entire national debt? Yeah, you can't do that often. The US national debt is about to hit $40 trillion. It was $20 trillion 9 years ago. What Trump and Biden should've done is implemented a windfall profits tax of probably 80%. But there's absolutely zero chance of that happening by either party.
  - JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
    > mean with the greatest wealth transfer to the wealthy in history that added a quarter to our entire national debt? The national debt was added before the inflation took hold to counter the Covid recession. (When the MMT nutters were at the helm.) Powell cured the resulting inflation without causing a recession. He did that without adding anything to our national debt. > What Trump and Biden should've done is implemented a windfall profits tax of probably 80% This just creates a political game of defining what is and isn't a windfall. A progressive corporate tax achieves what I think you want to without the side effects. Either way, the playbook for getting out of this is steeply increasing rates and then moderating them before inflation hits target.

ransom1538 4mo ago

Take on debt, as much as possible. Otherwise, inflation will end all. Inflation eats debt.

ck2 4mo ago

considering Iran War is likely to still be happening January 2029, imagine what costs will be like by then every single day $5/gas is taking a BILLION dollars out of the economy that could have gone elsewhere but it could be worse, we could be innocent civilian Iranians having the US bomb their water and power plants this week

bilsbie 4mo ago

I find it interesting how many people act like inflation doesn’t exist especially with salaries. If you made 100k in say 2000 the equivalent would be 200k today. If you go by median house price your salary should have doubled since 2015!

khriss 4mo ago

The worst part is that the 4.2% number is a floor on the actual inflation numbers. The US CPI has been lagging retail inflation for quite some time now (see 'hedonic regressions' by the BLS).

nonethewiser 4mo ago
Yeah it's been gamed for a long time. Did you know teh inflation metric can actually go down when staples it tracks goes up? Yup. If steak is tracked and it doubles in price, they can adjust the basket weights to reflect what they assume consumers will do: buy less beef and more chicken instead. So if Q1 steak=10 and Q2 steak=20 they might change the weights so that it's essential comparing Q1 steak to Q2 chicken. Which may be cheaper than Q1 steak, thus reducing inflation despite steak doubling in price.
- jfengel 4mo ago
  That doesn't strike me as a problem. It models what consumers actually do. The consumers are still being fed and they're suffering only a minor loss in their preference. They don't keep any kind of hedonic measure, which might be interesting. If a consumer would rather have steak, but switches to chicken when it's over $10/pound, and then switches to tofu when chicken hits $10/pound, they're considerably less happy even if they're reasonably well fed. You could probably use that to calculate some kind of hedonic metric: "I was originally willing to pay only $1/lb for tofu because it brought me 20% of the pleasure that a $5 steak would have." But you're not 80% less happy overall, since food is only part of your total happiness, so you'd need a "basket" of happiness.
  - Tadpole9181 4mo ago
    What? No. How in the world would that be an honest reflection of economic health? Even in your ideal scenario, if they switch to chicken. Compare the old price and new price of the chicken. Under your model, if people stop buying toilet paper, there's a 100% REDUCTION in the price of toilet paper in the model. The economy must be great! And, what, do we only want to care that food got more expensive the moment people are starving to death or eating pagpag to survive?

lanewinfield 4mo ago

https://50centadjustedforinflation.com/ https://50centadjustedforinflation.com/ 50 Cent is up 1 cent to 113 Cent.

Balgair 4mo ago

Serious question here: Can we trust these numbers out of this admin? I've not been super plugged into the latest news out of the BLS, but I seem to remember a lot of political firings in the 'econ' part of the government. I do not mean to be glib here either or start a flame war. I am genuinely asking.

tencentshill 4mo ago
It's currently headed by a pretty by-the-books guy, after a series of trump loyalists were rejected. Next up for nomination is another boring career professional, who actually pushed back against trumps bullshit and survived. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-nominee-head-bls-supports-statistical-agencys-independence-integrity-2026-06-10/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-nominee-head-bls-supp...
- Balgair 4mo ago
  Whew! thank you!

Blackstrat 4mo ago

This is not inflation. The is a supply and demand issue. There are two factors: increasing energy costs due to the season and the rising costs of AI data centers (a big impact in my area). And secondly, the disruption of the oil supply during the continued Middle East conflict. These two issues have caused an energy price spike. Yes, it will eventually result in wide spread costs. But, as the components in the above report indicate, it is not yet spread widely. We are all sensitive to gas price fluctuations. We'd all be better off if we admitted that alternative fuels, other than nuclear, will never provide the requisite energy required to advance civilization. It's time to quit pretending that it will and start building nuclear power plants. Wind and solar farms are not the answer. And end the Iraq war aggressively. It's been nearly 50 years and it's clear that Iraq will never negotiate honestly. So Trump and his allies need to stop pretending and end it. And the same applies to the Ukraine-Russia conflict - no more US tax dollars to the Ukrainian dictator.