Economy

The inflation optimists (the ones that say inflation is declining and we've almost got this licked) touts the rolling 12 months coming down, but looking at a bar chart of month-over-month and rolling 3 months averages, it's clear there's been a resurgence since December.

All of the inflation graphs are at: https://www.democraticunderground.com/10143231474#post1

I'll just post the regular aka "headline" CPI graph through March that came out 4/10/24, since that's the one that will be updated on Wednesday (along with the core CPI)
data source: https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CUSR0000SA0


In a 12 months rolling average, any month's increase is watered down by a factor of 1/12, so even if the latest month-over-month number is large, the change in the 12-month average looks like a little bump up -- and people just say, oh it’s a little bump up due to seasonal factors (the numbers are seasonally adjusted by the way).

Even a large 3 month increase gets watered down by a factor of 1/4 in a 12-month rolling average.

I'm not the only one that looks at shorter periods like 3 and 6 months to get a better read on CURRENT or RECENT inflation:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/new-inflation-reading-reinforces-feds-higher-for-longer-stance-144840988.html

(emphasis added)

Anyway, I'm waiting for people to realize that we're not on course for a soft landing.

That said, I expect a little bit of a downturn in the 3 month rolling average increases with the Wednesday CPI report because the huge month-over-month increase in January drops out of the 3 month window. But I'm expecting that the April over March increase will still be well above 3% (annualized).

(From surveys of economists conducted by Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal, it is expected that the core CPI will increase 0.3% and the regular CPI will increase 0.4% from March to April https://www.marketwatch.com/economy-politics/calendar )

Fans of the 12 month rolling average (the rolling year-over-year one) will also probably see a slight downturn in that graph as the large increase in April 2023 over March 2023 (0.43% which is over 5% annualized) drops out of the 12-month window. But it will be only a minute downturn if a 0.4% increase in this April over March replaces the one dropping out of the window.