This is the reason that serious people don’t choose a trend length that happens to fit with their narrative. For the last few months, supposedly-serious economists have crowed about how the 3-month average of seasonally-adjusted CPI was at a new post-COVID low. (Most of those same economists, only a few months ago, were focused on the 6-month average, but when that started crawling higher they switched to the 3-month average.) And indeed, it was exciting. Headline CPI was down to 1.89% on a seasonally-adjusted-three-month-average; core CPI was at 3.30%. Victory over inflation was proclaimed! Inflation was back at ... (full story)