Nearly everything in the world is super-weird and disrupted right now, and the tabulation of inflation statistics is no exception. jbarro writes
Photo: Jeff Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty On Tuesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released inflation data for April, and the headline figure is that consumer prices fell 0.8 percent from a month earlier. Not that they fell at an annualized rate of 0.8 percent, but that they fell 0.8 percent month over month — equivalent to an annualized inflation rate close to minus-10 percent. That was the steepest monthly decline since December 2008.
Each month, the federal government collects data about prices to see how they have changed. Then the BLS weights that price-change data based on assumptions about how much consumers spend on various kinds of goods and services: If consumers typically devote 14 percent of their spending to food, then the change in food prices makes up 14 percent of the overall inflation statistic.
If you look through the CPI release for the price categories that fell sharply, what you’ll find is a list of things you’re probably not doing much of anymore. Retail gasoline prices fell 21 percent last month as people worldwide stopped driving. Various kinds of travel services became a lot cheaper: airfares down 15 percent, vehicle rentals down 17 percent, “other lodging away from home” down 8 percent.
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