Monday, May 19, 2008
Is UK CPI 'adjusted' too?
Dailyreckoning: Consumer Price Indexes May Lie
The IMF, for example, says food prices rose 43% last year. Yet, after the feds waved their wands, US food costs were up only 5.1%. And import costs rose 15% year to year – according to the numbers when they first got off the boat. But by the time the Labor Department statisticians had finished ‘adjusting’ them, they were down to only 0.2%.
“Inflation may be worse than the consumer price index shows,” reports a suspicious USA Today.
Posted by cornishman @ 08:17 AM (828 views) Add Comment
16 Comments
- If you do not have an admin password leave the password field blank.
- If you would like to request a password allowing you to add comments and blog news articles without needing each one approved manually, send an e-mail to the webmaster.
- Your email address is required so we can verify that the comment is genuine. It will not be posted anywhere on the site, will be stored confidentially by us and never given out to any third party.
- Please note that any viewpoints published here as comments are user's views and not the views of HousePriceCrash.co.uk.
- Please adhere to the Guidelines
1. denzil said...
Interesting! Whether the UK stats are intentionally fiddled, I certainly don't know. As with any stat it can be bent into any shape the compiler of stats chooses. What I do know is that the CPI of 2.0% is nothing like the impact of inflation on me. I would safely say that my personal inflation is at least 8.0%. I really don't think I'm alone and that there are many people within the UK whose pay increase have been inline with CPI/RPI but in reality the expendable income of those workers has been eroded year-on-year due to a consistent underestimate of the inflation the consumer is subjected to. If the CPI is fiddled or its weighting is unrepresentative, then this acts as a double-edged sword for the government because can "appear" to have inflation under control but in reality the consumer is slowly but surely becoming poorer, poor to the point that the consumer cannot spend.
2. planning4acrash said...
CPI is useless, period. You are affected by the money supply growth. My post about Newspeak attempts to give people the tools to stop using the language of the enemy, which, by eliminating things from language, attempts to stop us talking about them. Defining inflation as consumer price rises, as we know, eliminates the very real inflation of houses, raw materials and reduces emphasis on routine purchases like food. All to keep interest rates artificially low, to encourage monetary expansion, to facilitate profiteering by financiers and a big government deficit to pay for things like Iraq, and soon Iran. And to pay for all the social programs that aim to solve about 5% of the harm caused by inflation, such as inflated social housing programs to deal with the severe affects of house price inflation. Notably only available to the government's own "key workers" and to the destitute who would otherwise be on the streets (the destitute should always be helped but there would be a tiny fraction of the current number of people in poverty if only we moved to a 100% gold standard and abandoned monetary expansion).
3. planning4acrash said...
which, by eliminating things from language, attempts to stop us THINKING about them.
4. dohousescrashinthewoods said...
“Inflation may be worse than the consumer price index shows"? Really?!
Golly, what is the world coming to.
;)
5. cornishman said...
It was so long ago that I read them, that 1984 and Brave New World merge in my mind. Was 1984 the book with the viewscreen in every house that enabled Big Brother to see what was going on?
It seems uncanny to me that someone could foresee that happening over 60 years ago. Whilst we are not quite there yet, it's easy to see now that the internet connection linked to the plasma TV linked to the webcam will be used to 'monitor' what happens in each house. It will doubtless be justified by anti-terrorism laws and the argument will be put about that 'if you haven't got anything to hide then you have nothing to fear'.
Just as blog comments will be removed if they do not 'conform'...
6. sold 2 rent 1 said...
Yep. They are fiddled.
Look at the CPI methodolgy change in 2006 shortly after the M3 stats are abandoned.
7. cornishman said...
whoops -wrong thread
8. cornishman said...
@ S2R1
it seems that one of your graphs is an expansion of 5 years-worth of the 20-year graph. But it is a completely different shape - so it can't be. The blue and yellow lines do not correspond
Or am I being a bit thick? It is Monday morning after all...
9. sold 2 rent 1 said...
cornishman,
Looks fine to me.
10. cornishman said...
nah - the yellow line is in different places on each graph.
in 2004 it's at 1% on one and 15% on the other.
11. sold 2 rent 1 said...
Yellow line is left hand scale
12. cornishman said...
Told you I was probably being thick. Put my comment above at 9.29 in the wrong bit too. Must have been the whisky last night. Either that or I'm having a 'change of conciousness' as I get older...
I wonder why they changed the left hand scale on the 5 year graph. Couldn't be to try and make it look like something was correlated?
13. george monsoon said...
Could someone explain what MZM money is?
14. This comment has been removed as it was found to be in breach of our Blog Policies.
15. This comment has been removed as it was found to be in breach of our Blog Policies.
16. This comment has been removed as it was found to be in breach of our Blog Policies.