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Posts tagged with: "CPILFENS"

View this series on FRED

How food and fuel prices fluctuate

Detailed prices from the CPI

The consumer price index (CPI) follows the price of a basket of goods. The goods in the basket are determined by the purchases of an “average” U.S. household. Each item is tracked at multiple locations and for numerous varieties. The data are then aggregated to form the CPI.

The CPI has been a part of FRED for quite some time (since the early days if not the very beginning). FRED also offers some finer slices of consumer price data. The graph includes three examples: unleaded gasoline, peppers, and tomatoes. These are still aggregates, as the tracked prices come from many locations and, for tomatoes at least, across the various brands, varieties, and other ways of differentiating products.

What immediately gets our attention is how dynamic these lines are. The prices for these items change a lot and with little notice, which is why monetary policymakers in general prefer to look at price indices that exclude food and energy: Volatility can hide the bigger picture of inflation.

To reveal the extent of this volatility, we constructed the graph below, which compares the general CPI and the CPI without food and energy. For the latter, we even included the series without seasonal adjustment to demonstrate that seasonal adjustment does not remove the noise that policymakers are worried about.

How these graphs were created: For the first graph, start from the Average Price Data release table, check the items you want displayed, and click “Add to Graph.” For the second graph, start from the CPI graph and go to the “Edit Graph” panel. From there, open the “Add Line” tab and search for “CPI less food and energy”; add the monthly seasonally adjusted series. Repeat for the not seasonally adjusted series. Finally, adjust the units to “Percent Change from Year Ago” and click “Copy to All.”

Suggested by Christian Zimmermann.

View on FRED, series used in this post: APU0000712311, APU0000712406, APU000074714, CPIAUCSL, CPILFENS, CPILFESL

Is inflation running hot or cold?

One popular measure of the price level is the consumer price index (CPI), which measures the average change over time in the prices paid by urban consumers for a market basket of goods and services. This index can be broken down into smaller component indexes, each representing a different subset of goods and services. So changes in the aggregate price level can be traced back to changes in the price levels of the underlying components. As described in a recent Economic Synopses essay, we have developed a “heat map” that visually represents CPI data in FRED: specifically, the relative inflation levels of various CPI components over the past 10 years. The heat map shown here lists the components in order according to their weight in the overall index as of July 17, 2015.

2015 July 20 FRED Blog post heat map x800

How this heat map was created: We used the FRED Add-In for Microsoft Excel (view instructions for installing the Add-In here) to download the FRED data: year-over-year percent change in each CPI component index over the past 10 years. We normalized each value by subtracting the series mean and dividing by its standard deviation calculated over the past 10 years to take into account differences in long-term trends and volatility across series. Each colored box in the heat map corresponds to the normalized inflation value for a given CPI component for a particular month. Blue represents an inflation value below the long-term trend of the index, and red represents an inflation value above the long-term trend. The darker the color, the greater the difference between that particular inflation value and the long-run average for the component index in terms of standard deviations.

Because we’re comparing series against their long-run averages, it’s possible for a “blue” series to have a higher inflation rate than a “red” series. For example, for June 2015, owners’ equivalent rent is red, with an inflation value of 2.95 percent; water, sewer, and trash is blue, and yet has a higher inflation value of 4.65 percent. The reason is that the June 2015 owners’ equivalent rent inflation is above its 10-year average of 2.16 percent; and the June 2015 water, sewer, and trash inflation is below its 10-year average of 5.11 percent.

Suggested by Joseph T. McGillicuddy and Lowell R. Ricketts.

View on FRED, series used in this post: CPIAPPNS, CPIAUCNS, CPIEDUNS, CPIENGNS, CPILFENS, CPIRECNS, CPIUFDNS, CUUR0000SAF116, CUUR0000SAG1, CUUR0000SAH3, CUUR0000SAM1, CUUR0000SAM2, CUUR0000SAS4, CUUR0000SEGA, CUUR0000SEHA, CUUR0000SEHB, CUUR0000SEHC, CUUR0000SEHG, CUUR0000SETA01, CUUR0000SETA02


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