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Why there's so much confusion over US housing inflation
When January inflation numbers came in hot last month, one big reason was a spike in "owner's equivalent rent" (OER), the concept the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses to account for inflation in homes that people own. • But the uptick may have been largely driven by a change in statistical methodology that was revealed over the last week. Why it matters: The kerfuffle shows how much of our understanding of the economy rests on abstract concepts and decisions made in the bowels of the statistics-collecting bureaucracy that usually doesn't get much public attention. • The result is confusion about how high housing ... (full story)