The FRED Blog has discussed why measuring inflation trends is important for policy analysis. In a nutshell: The month-to-month inflation rate changes too often and by too much to reliably inform financial decisions. To address this challenge, researchers use different methods to study the difference between temporary and persistent changes in consumer prices. The FRED graph above shows consumer price inflation (the black dashed line). It also shows two versions of the underlying inflation gauge (UIG), a recently added data series measuring the trend component—that is, the persistent component—of inflation. The series ... (full story)