November 14, 2024
Virtually all economists saw the October Consumer Price Index report this week as providing positive news on inflation. The overall inflation rate for October was just 0.2 percent, while the core rate was 0.3 percent. This brought year-over-year inflation to 2.6 percent.
This is still above the Fed’s 2.0 percent target, but the gap is entirely due to rent. Without rent, inflation would have been just 1.3 percent in the last year. Rental inflation in turn is being held up by leases signed in past years. Rents on units that turn over have been rising at less than a 2.0 percent annual rate.
Inflation in food was again low, rising just 0.1 percent in October. It is up 1.1 percent year-over-year.
CBS was not about to let the good news on inflation affect its reporting. It found a woman who told viewers that the price of her groceries had doubled since the pandemic. The CPI index for store-bought food has increased by 25.9 percent since the pandemic. If the price of this woman’s grocery basket actually doubled then she is incredibly atypical.
CBS is not providing information about the economy when if finds an extremely atypical person to represent a larger trend. CBS could have with equal validity presented a consumer who had not seen any increase in the price of their groceries since the pandemic. That would be equally representative.
It is striking that news outlets are still finding atypical people to make a point about the economy that is not true. Perhaps that will change after Donald Trump is inaugurated.
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