The New York Times does it again. I mean, how stupid is this? The NYT’s big scoop on today’s inflation numbers was that inflation “ticked up” to 3.3% in July, from 3.0% in June. Sounds ominous, right? Wrong! The only reason the “headline” rate rose was because last July’s (of 2022) decrease in prices fell off the 12-month calculation. Got that? Inflation “ticked up” in July, supposedly making the Fed’s job harder getting inflation down, not because prices actually ticked up in July — they didn’t — but because a price decline from year ago July fell out of the 12-month calculation. What idiocy.
For the record, prices increased from June 2023 to July 2023 by about 0.2 percent, which is a 2.6 percent annual rate. Over the last 6 months inflation by this measure has been 2.5 percent (annualized). I get that most journalists and editors are fundamentally innumerate, and don’t understand data or statistics, but this is a particularly dumb report. Don’t make the mistake of characterizing this month’s economic activity by what happened a year ago! Here’s the link to the raw data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. It’s really easy to do these calculations. (But too hard for the New York Times, apparently.) Full data table below the fold.
Here’s the Times’ totally misleading headline today: