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Politics : The Obama - Clinton Disaster -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wayners who wrote (41338)	11/18/2010 9:33:39 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 103300

The single BEST metric for measuring the level of consumer level price inflation that I have come across thus far is put out by the Dallas Fed. It's called the 'trimmed mean Personal Consumption Deflator' (Trimmed mean P.C.E.) 'Trimmed mean' simply means that they throw out from the P.C.E. whichever two monthly stats are the biggest outliers that particular month. (Whichever two are the furthermost away from the central trend that month. Which two, out of the hundreds of things that they measure the prices for month to month, are out of trend the most. But by 'trimming' the two biggest 'wild hairs' each month it makes for a steadier, less jumpy, and more usable measure. Easier to see the true trend that way....) There are still some quirks left over from the C.P.I. that are in the P.C.E. (nothing is prefect) but all-in-all it's LOADS BETTER then the C.P.I. which, (IMO), doesn't even come close to showing what's going on. Still, doesn't matter much what particular measure you look at... if you take a long enough view (year-over-year, at least) all the measures say pretty much the exact same thing right now: NO INFLATION worth talking about in the US. In fact, the last few months show actual deflation in real terms.