Good news

Created
Fri, 13/01/2023 - 04:00
Updated
Fri, 13/01/2023 - 04:00
Will anyone hear about it? We’re obsessing today on the Joe Biden documents case hour after hour so I doubt many of you have heard about this. Dean Baker reports: The December Consumer Price Index (CPI), following a great December jobs report, shows the economy has turned the corner and seems on a path to stable growth with moderate inflation. The CPI showed prices actually fell by 0.1 percent for the month. This brought the annualized rate of inflation over the last three months in the overall index to just 1.8 percent. With the drop in prices reported in December, the real average hourly wage for all workers is now 0.3 percent above its pre-pandemic level. For production and non-supervisory workers it is 0.8 percent higher. And, for production and non-supervisory workers in the low-paying hotel and restaurant sector it is up 5.7 percent. The overall index for December was held down by a 4.5 percent plunge in energy prices, but the 0.3 percent rise in the core index should not be terribly troubling. The biggest factor pushing the core index higher was a 0.8 percent rise in both the rent proper index and the owners equivalent rent index, which together comprise almost 40 percent of the core index. The core index, excluding shelter, fell by 0.1 percent in December.   We know the rent indexes will be showing much lower inflation in 2023, and possibly even deflation, based on private indexes of rents in marketed units. Research from the…