Monday, March 16, 2015

Deflation becoming inflation says Billion Prices Project

WSJ: One of the biggest economic questions facing the U.S. economy in 2015 is this: Will measures of inflation veer into deflationary territory, or will prices firm?
The Billion Prices Project, which scrapes the Internet daily to capture changing prices online and has often foreshadowed subsequent changes in official price indexes, shows a sharp turn upward in measures of inflation, albeit from a low starting point.
The issue was whether that sharp drop in the red line would continue declining.  These are YoY changes, meaning that it takes a big couple of quarterly price declines to register a price decline over the previous year. The official CPI, the blue line, barely went negative, year over year, but given that basis was 2%, it must have taken a fairly large negative plunge this quarter. Here is inflation data:

Monthly deflation was -0.57% in December 2014,  -0.54% in November, -0.25% in October, -0.17% in August and -0.04% in July. But as the January 2014 numbers fell out of the calculation and were replaced by a massive -0.47% the annual inflation became deflation.

When they say, 'January 14 fell out of the calculation', they mean it no longer was in the 4 quarter look back.  So January had a price jump holding up the Year over Year rate.   So is the Billion Prices uptick, that little red hook at the end, significant? Not yet.  We are still dominated by six months of consumer price declines and that is still pinching profits.  The next tell will be jobs reports, will job gains taper off?

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