Quote:
Originally Posted by blankall
Interesting. So it's not an ongoing rate of inflation. It's just a total estimate of price increases over the last year, with things leveled off over the last four months. So you could say that inflation is already back to normal.
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The big caveat is that a lot of what's keeping overall inflation at a normal level the last 4 months has been declines in energy prices compared to earlier in the year, which isn't going to continue indefinitely. So if non-energy prices keep rising while energy levels off, then we have inflation again.
At the same time, energy affects basically everything, but its impact isn't necessarily felt immediately in terms of consumer prices. So a lot of the prices for goods now are based on energy, raw material, and transport prices from months ago. And all of those things have come down in price recently, so there's some reason to think that price pressures will soften a bit (barring another spike in energy prices).