“Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it,” goes the famous quip (written, by the way, by Charles Dudley Warner and quoted by Mark Twain in a lecture). The connection between the weather and the economy is popular among the chattering classes these days. There’s some who think that the winter storms from earlier this month have suppressed business and consumer activity to a degree and so March will bring a stronger bit of growth than we’d otherwise see. In turn, that implies that we shouldn’t get too uptight about data dispatches for this month, as we did yesterday with regards to weekly jobless claims.
Daily Archives: February 19, 2010
A WHIFF OF DEFLATION IN THE CPI REPORT
Headline inflation last month rose a modest 0.2%, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. That’s been the pace each and every month since last September. Over the past year, inflation was a mild 2.6%. On the surface, it’s all quite humdrum. But wait—what’s this? There’s an outlier in the core inflation trend for January: CPI less food and energy slipped by 0.1%.