[Steko]

The Consumer Price Index (CPI), for example, measures the prices of a basket of household goods and services that households regularly consume, with weights assigned to each item in the basket based on their average shares of total expenditures. Among these is a shelter component that includes both rental costs and the consumption value of owner-occupied housing, in addition to other forms of lodging such as hotels. Shelter makes up nearly a third of the basket for CPI inflation, and 40 percent of the basket for core CPI that excludes the volatile food and energy components.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/blog/2021/09/09/housing-price...

You can bet every HN thread about inflation will be full of bad info from cranks.

[qeternity]

Yes but through hedonic adjustment fuckery, many CPI measurements, especially housing, are complete nonsense.

Basically, if the cost of housing is rising, but the quality of housing is also rising, then these things will offset to a degree as far as CPI is concerned.

It’s one of the reasons healthcare inflation is so absurdly underrepresented. CPI basically assumes that you could pick any level of quality for a good or a service since the index inception. But you can’t go to a hospital and say “I just have a small cut on my finger, I’d like the 1950s level of care”…you will get the 2021 level of care and 2021 prices. But CPI will say “ah that’s not necessarily inflation because the quality of care has also gone up!”

[the_gastropod]

Of course CPI is imperfect and worthy of plenty of criticism. But one must acknowledge: it’s an incredibly complicated thing to try and measure. This cynical conspiracy theory that big bad government is twisting its evil mustache and trying to make inflation look low is… well, I don’t think it holds up to much scrutiny.

[qeternity]

Completely agree. And hedonic adjustments are not a bad thing either. As you say, inflation is an insanely complex beast that we don’t really understand.

But it’s worth pointing out that certain agencies use CPI imperfections when it suits them: the Fed has pointed to low inflation for years as justification to continue its monetary policies. And then when CPI no longer backs their actions, they change the narrative and claim it’s “transitory”.

CPI isn’t broken. It can’t be broken. It’s just a metric with a methodology.

But our interpretation of CPI is broken at best, and manipulative at worst.

[the_gastropod]

What incentive is there for the Fed to continue printing as opposed to doing the right thing? What’s the conspiracy here?

[qeternity]

Risk assets will fall, which although not part of their mandate, they are very sensitive to (see previous tapertantrum).