You will find the answer to you question is NO.
Nobody does know ;^)
Seriously, the most instructive quote, to me, is:
Another popular game is to sift out the more volatile items in the basket of goods and services—often energy and food—and focus on the remainder as a truer “underlying” or “core” rate of inflation. This exercise, though it succeeds in producing a less volatile index, is dubious. The least volatile components are not necessarily the most informative. Some of them appear to be unresponsive to economic forces because of pitfalls in measurement or stickiness in their speed of adjustment to market forces. The price of rental housing, for example, is fixed month-to-month by contract. At the other end of the scale, some of the most volatile items—such as precious metals—are highly informative, to the extent that their movements anticipate a broad range of sectors where price changes have not yet been perceived.
Silver:
[img_assist|nid=4238|title=Silver Price (source Monex.com)|desc=Looked at silver since it seems to be not as sexy as gold–hence more accurate…?|link=node|align=left|width=466|height=353]
No surprise, there is a definite trend upwards around 2003, but it is not anywhere near scary as the housing plots–only up around 100 percent or am I missing a multiplier somewhere?
