« The Yield Curve Widens | Main | My Favorite Links »

The Wall Street Journal reports:

The consumer price index rose 0.3% in October, the Labor Department said Thursday, matching September's increase. The core CPI, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, advanced 0.2% for a fifth-straight month. The headline and core gains matched Wall Street expectations, according to a Dow Jones Newswires survey.

Unrounded, the CPI rose 0.293% last month. The core CPI advanced 0.159% unrounded.

Consumer prices were up 3.5% from a year ago. The core CPI was up 2.2% compared to the same month a year ago, up from 2.1% in September.

Still, that remains near the 2% top end of the Federal Reserve's assumed comfort zone for annual core inflation. The Fed's preferred gauge, the core price index for personal consumption expenditures, is within that range at 1.8% annual growth through September.

The government's inflation data comes in for a lot of well-deserved ribbing. Still, the overall trend of inflation is tame. The United States is in no danger of slipping into hyper-inflation.

Even after high inflation was defeated in the early 1980s, the core CPI rate was often over 5% and that didn't impede growth. The year-over-year core rate hasn't gone over 3% or under 1% in over a decade.

Posted by edelfenbein at November 15, 2007 11:55 AM