The CPI Report for March

Today’s CPI report said that headline inflation rose 0.5% in March which was inline with economists’ expectations. The core rate rose by 0.1% which was half of what was expected.

Economists were expecting headline inflation to rise 0.5% and core inflation to rise 0.2%.

With my blog I like to find the stats behind what’s reported by the media. Breaking out the decimals, we see that headline inflation actually rose by 0.549% for March. In other words, the CPI was just a teeny tiny bit from rounding up to 0.6%.

While it’s really not that big of a deal, and we should laugh at the idea of the government’s measurements being so accurate, if the media had said that headline inflation rose by 0.6% in March, I think the market’s behavior would be very different today.

Breaking out the core rate, we see that it rose by 0.135% in March which is still below the 0.2% expected by economists but not as much as the media reports would lead us to believe.

By the way, those numbers are seasonally adjusted. The non-seasonally adjusted headline rate, rose by an annualized rate of 12.35%.

Here’s a look at the annualized monthly core seasonally-adjusted inflation rate:

Posted by on April 15th, 2011 at 10:48 am


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