The government has plenty of reasons to skew the inflations statistics, and from everything I’ve ever seen, they darn sure do. If you want a conservative view of how badly things are skewed, you might read Bill Gross June newsletter over at pimco:
Not as conservative, but backed by data is John William’s site, Shadow Government Statistics. He calculates that if we were still calculating CPI the way the government did before Clinton, we would currently be just under 8%.
And if you go to the store, you might not know how to calculate inflation, but you sure do know that prices sure are going up fast. And might I add, pretty much everyone knows. Which is why I shake my head when I hear the fed officials talking about how “if” inflation expectations were to become unmoored….. Yeah, right, like what planet do you guys live on? Inflation expectations in the general public have been unmoored for a long time and are only getting worse.
