Inflation data | Inflation | Finance & Capital Markets | Khan Academy

ruticker 07.03.2025 23:38:59

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In the last video, we talked a little bit about what inflation is in the Consumer Price Index (CPI). I thought I would actually show you data and maybe point out a few interesting things right over here. So, this right over here is the monthly press release, or it's a table from the monthly press release issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is **Table A**, which is really a summary of all of the important things. It's the percent changes in CPI for all Urban consumers (CPI-U), and they do it for non-Urban consumers and all the rest. But the CPI that is quoted is the one for urban consumers, the US city average. What I always find is that the details are much more interesting than what you hear just on the news. When people say, "Oh, the CPI changed by, you know, 0.5%," one thing I do want to point out—and this is true of the CPI, this is true of all government statistics, and frankly, this is true of any report that any company gives you—is that it's very important to keep in mind whether they're giving a sequential change or whether they're giving a year-over-year change. For example, there might be a press release like this one, and the text of it, or maybe the headline number when you look at your local newspaper or news report, will say, "Look, in June 2011, inflation on all items in the entire basket of goods went down by 0.2%." You might say, "Oh wow, look, there's no inflation! In fact, prices are going down; this would be minor deflation." But it's important to realize that this is only the seasonally adjusted prices from May to June. When I talk about seasonally adjusted, traditionally, maybe people use a different amount of energy or a different amount of gasoline from May to June, and they try to factor that in when they compare the basket of goods—the price of the basket of goods—from May to June. So that's what they talk about when seasonally adjusting. If you look over here, the prices went down from May to June according to the seasonal adjustment. However, the year-over-year changes are still up. If you compare June 2011 to June 2010, it is still up by **3.6%**. In general, the monthly changes are going to be a little bit more volatile. Obviously, you have the seasonal adjustments and other short-term factors that might change it, but the year-over-year figure is a stronger signal for what is actually happening with inflation. Although someone might want to pay attention to the monthly figure because that's obviously giving you the most up-to-date information on what's happening now. What you'll often see is they'll give an inflation number for everything and then they'll subtract out food and energy. This is **all items less food and energy** because food and energy represent a good bit of the basket, but they're very volatile. You can see it right here in this report: year-over-year, energy has gone up double digits—**20%** for energy. Generally, if you look at fuel oil, it's up **35.6%**. At least on this report, it has been coming down more recently, but year-over-year, it's been up a huge amount. So that's actually the main driving factor for this **3.6%** increase. If you take food and energy out of the equation, if you compare the basket of goods minus that, inflation was only up **1.6%**. It's interesting, even within that, you can look at which parts of the economy or which products and services are getting a lot more expensive and which ones are getting cheaper. It's actually interesting that used cars and trucks are up **5.1%**; that seems like a pretty strong price increase for used items.

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