Paul KrugmanOne thing I've been noticing in my correspondence is how many people think inflation is still running wild; the big deceleration in the 2nd half of 2022 hasn't broken through to public consciousness 1/
Several reasons for this. Too many media reports focus on yoy inflation, so miss the big turn. Traditional core inflation still reflecting rent increases from a year ago. And asymmetric reporting: breathless coverage of rising inflation, disinflation not so much 2/
But anyway, the truth is striking. Here's 3-month "supercore" excluding food energy shelter and used cars: 3/
Jeremy 🅰️ Williams 
@pkrugman honest question: why do these figures frequently exclude food, energy, and housing? I’d argue those are three of the areas people feel inflation most acutely.
Matt Baggott@jeremyawilliams @pkrugman Probably because those three aren't discretionary spending. If you want to see if consumers are spending too much and overheating the economy, excluding them should make the metric more focused and sensitive.
Steve In Ashland@mattbagg @jeremyawilliams @pkrugman except food is very fungible. Calories are less so, but the cost of the source of calories is. I can get 500cal from a can of beans, a lump of butter, or a salmon; all very different costs.
@steveinashland @mattbagg @pkrugman fair, but when I could get 18 eggs for 1.99 and now they’re 4.75, or a pound of ground beef that was 3.00 is now 6.00, that really makes a day-to-day impact.
@jeremyawilliams @steveinashland @pkrugman Sure, it's not perfect and it's more for diagnosis and picking solutions than for tracking impact. There are dozens of consumer price and inflation measures that emphasize different things. My point is I think Krugman is picking this metric because he is trying to talk about how much consumers are currently driving inflation, not how much inflation is hurting people.
@jeremyawilliams @steveinashland @pkrugman (eggs also have a specific cause of inflation --bird flu-- that is unrelated to other sources of inflation.)
@mattbagg @steveinashland @pkrugman I agree that no one is talking about how month-over-month inflation is easing, I just didn’t understand how you can remove the items that take up the bulk of people’s budgets and say they don’t have an effect. Also, I understand the issue with eggs, but I think there’s also some justification of raising prices because they can get away with it as well.