The March Deflation Mystery Is Solved. Hint: “Can You Hear Me Now?”
Let me preface this by saying that I have no idea how much weight to assign to what at least on the surface sounds like a hilarious excuse for Friday's abysmal CPI data.
In other words: this could be something profound or it could be the latest incarnation of the ubiquitous "weather" excuse for poor economic data, but it's funny regardless which is why I'm writing this and probably why you're reading it.
So recall that on Friday whoever wasn't already on vacation was treated to the first decli
If a one-time change in data plans has that much impact, imagine what car prices can do month to month.
this is called heuristic changes; if you get more but pay the same, .gov calls this deflation. its how they figure a TV compared to 30 years ago cost less than $0. if we measured the cost of the service, telecommunications, we’d get better, more accurate inflation data. but that also would show inflation to be much higher than reported. which is where negative real interest rates come from, and are req’d after each recession. and in a way, remove $ from the general economy and ‘store’ it in asset prices, which is how the top .1% get so much of the gdp.