Prices in this economy of ours rose 0.3% last month, according to the November consumer price index. That’s the highest number we’ve seen in seven months.
Meanwhile, annual inflation has been rising each month for three months: Annual inflation back in September was 2.4%, in October the number grew to 2.6%, and in November it grew again, to 2.7%. So shouldn’t we be a little freaked out by that?
Omair Sharif, president of research firm Inflation Insights, said he doesn’t think so.
There’s a lot of data that went into November’s inflation number, and some of it was a little wackadoodle. That could have thrown off the final number a little.
“Hotel rates today in the data in November went up. On an annualized basis they went up 45%,” Sharif said.
That on its own is a wild number.
“Similarly, on the negative side, if you wanted to rent a car or truck on an annualized basis, those prices declined by 31% today,” Sharif said.
If you tune these extremes out, he said, price inflation in November wasn’t 0.3%, it was closer to 0.2%. And that’s much more encouraging.
One of the biggest pieces of the inflation pie is the cost of having a roof over your head. And that’s starting to look somewhat better.
“What we’ve seen over the last few months is a significant moderation in shelter inflation,” said Eric Winograd, chief economist at Alliance Bernstein.
Rent and other shelter prices went up 0.3% from October to November.
“Which is higher than you might like to see, but much lower than it has been,” said Winograd. “It suggests that these things are moving in the right direction.”
But a lot of people have issues with the rent data — it can lag by a year and a half, for example.
So some economists like to take it out of the inflation equation just to see what happens. Jeffrey Roach is one of them. He’s chief economist at LPL Financial.
“So I look at excluding housing, consumer prices are roughly 1.6% up from a year ago, meaning it’s a lot more reasonable and not really worthy of a freakout moment,” he said.
Not a freakout moment, but also not totally sleeping easy, either. It’s definitely taking longer than people thought to get inflation down to a healthy level.
