This reminds me of that old joke "In the fall of 1972 President Nixon announced that the rate of increase of inflation was decreasing. This was the first time a sitting president used the third derivative to advance his case for reelection."
https://www.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/quotations...
To be clear, the article is not discussing the third derivative, but rather arguing that the standard “now versus one year ago” measure is heavily back-weighted due to factors early this past year. The second derivative is down!
Is that like how it was convenient in the 2010’s when discussing “terrorist attacks on US soul” to conveniently leave out 2001 because it was an “outlier?”
The generally quoted inflation rate compares now to this time last year – so until next June, it includes the increases that happened before the Fed decided there was a problem.
This is useful in a lot of contexts, but if you want to know whether prices will be higher next month, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to use a lagging indicator.
> The consumer price index has been relatively stable since the Fed started raising interest rates.
The PCE, which the Fed uses—not the CPI—as its inflation gauge for policymaking has not been flat (historically, the PCE and CPI have generally been pretty close, but the PCE shot up much more than the CPI in the recent inflation, and did not quickly drop and stay near zero monthly % change like the CPI in response to the Fed intervention [it was low in July and November, but not the intervening months.])
That would apply also to anyone who made a campaign issue out of some train or car being too jerky. Later examples might include the Toyota unintended acceleration?