News Analysis
Every economic news release these days is an exercise in downplaying disaster. The bureau in question carefully crafts the results announcement, and the media picks up on it, spinning the bad news as good news. It seems to happen every time, such as with the terrible jobs report last week that somehow got rendered as a wonderful jobs creation. The reality was far more grim.
And so this habit continues with today’s release of the Consumer Price Index, which I had expected to be flat to falling month-over-month. I was preparing to explain that this is not necessarily good news. Instead, what we got was another month-over-month increase of 0.4 percent, which is the same as last month, and a far cry from July when the release led the preposterous Biden administration to claim that there was “zero” inflation….