It's debatable whether this is good longterm policy - but it's been the norm in the US for decades.
I don't know how that speed was determined. Either it's using a linear decrease since 2000 (which isn't correct, the inverse of exponential inflation would be logarithmic decay, not linear), or it's weighting by recency for the high inflation since 2020 (which may continue, or may not.)
It won't be 100% accurate, but it's close enough to create a visual. And the number is always updated monthly with real data anyways.
We aim for "inflation of 2 percent over the longer run, as measured by the annual change in the price index for personal consumption expenditures" [1].
How closely does that track with CPI-U, which is the index this web site is using? If I believe Gemini, PCE should show a slightly lower inflation number?
That’s it. There’s no further intention behind this, I just thought a real time “decay” visualization would be neat.
Literally everything about how this works is in the source in maybe 30 lines of js. It’s not complicated. Data is from BLS (whether or not that's accurate is another conversation entirely). I auto update the data monthly via a chron job, right around the time new data is published.
I’m not really changing this from where it’s at. It’s done as is. There are other sources out there already if you want to customize the date range or see a graph.
Thanks for checking it out :).
Nowadays if you're properly rich you can buy a seat on a sub-orbital flight. This wasn't an option in '00, no matter how rich you were.
On the other end of the scale, for basic things a (really) good quality loaf of bread will always be cheaper in Poland than say up north from Oslo, Norway; whereas a USA-designed made-in-China laptop pretty much never did scale with the rest of the "CPI basket"...
Point being: we sure do have numbers - what they really mean in practice is vague at best.
https://www.jpmorgan.com/insights/global-research/currencies... | https://spectator.com/article/the-us-currency-is-under-attac...
Do you mean that we’ll have high inflation because we’ll keep running massive deficits? Because many countries that don’t have the reserve currency also have low inflation.
So why don't Japan and Germany have high inflation, since those country's currencies aren't the reserve currency either?
This is far from clear.
That would make imports more expensive and exports more competitive. Some pain, given we run a deficit [1]. But $50bn/month adustment in a $30tn economy is 2%. Not fun. But not a "crash."
(There is a genuine argument to be made that American voters have been rejecting dollar hegemony across multiple elections for a couple of decades.)
[1] https://www.bea.gov/data/intl-trade-investment/international...
And thus manufacturing will return to the US! I thought we wanted that. It's the only way out of the Triffin dilemma.
The real hack was asking them to put Big Mac sauce on the McDouble. For $.30 it was pretty damn close at 1/3 the price.
And you're right, the food has gotten worse as well.
Paying for convenience does make sense if you value the convenience.
In the year 2000, there were just less products and services then there are now. And the products that did exist were generally more durable and repairable than today. And in many cases, products that exist now but didn’t back then have reasonable substitutes (like renting or buying movies, since you don’t have Netflix).
I would even take it one step further and say that the ways you had to interact with those substitutes were healthier and more social than what we have now.
In my mind those level of interest usually come from the stock market or house appreciation, but I guess those are much faster (I seem to recall doubling every 8 years in the stock market and housing being a bit slower).
Something feels like it'll give out, but I've felt that way for 8 years at this point and I haven't been correct.
DCA and pray I suppose.
edit: a word
It's a bit more than I expected but a 2% drop 26 times gets pretty close to halving.
The number on the page suggests 2.5% average inflation.
Don’t keep your retirement savings all in cash.
[1] - https://news.gallup.com/poll/266807/percentage-americans-own...
Real wages are up since 2000 [1]. (Even the federal minimum wage went up 40% in nominal terms [2], though that is less than inflation.)
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Minimum_Wage_Act_of_2007
I also don't see why you're citing the nominal federal minimum wage. The nominal value is totally irrelevant to the conversation. $1 is still nominally $1, but according to the link it is also now $0.51 in purchasing power.
Cash is also capital.
If you were trying to say it’s a problem that our economic system favors deploying capital into investments instead of hoarding cash, I disagree. An economy where everyone is incentivized to hoarde cash instead of deploying it to investments doesn’t progress because the smartest thing you could do with your money is to not invest it in new businesses or buildings. It doesn’t work.
> Most people are paid in dollars, not shares of the S&P 500.
You’re conflating income and savings.
It wouldn’t matter if you got paid in dollars or in S&P 500 shares of the same dollar value. You can exchange one for the other. In the year 2026 you can do that instantly from your phone with an app and not pay any fees.
The point was not that S&P 500 shares are a superior unit of trade, because they’re not. I’m trying to explain that long term savings needs to be in an investment, not sitting around in actual cash.
It's funny you say this and also this:
>You’re conflating income and savings.
You're doing the same thing.
The problem I was hitting on is that large portions of our population don't have any investments are therefore are being left further behind by this tradeoff of stocks in favor of cash. You can't just tell people not to leave their cash sitting around when they don't actually have any cash sitting around.
On April 7 2000 a 30-year Treasury 5.71%. It would be worth $1,063 today and have paid out $1,484.60 in coupons to date. Even if you held those coupons in cash, you'd still have 2.5x'd your money.
Modern currencies split their medium-of-currency and store-of-value functions. The plain dollar is for transacting. Cash and cash equivalents are for transporting value across time.
A change of one hundred millionth of a percent is not enough to consider even if I have 10 million dollars.
How is this calculated? It's a rate based on historical purchasing power parity index trends, or it's tied to live market data?
