by John S. Tobey
Forbes
All the inflation reports have a fatal flaw: A reliance on a moving, 12-month time period. The use of the latest, trailing twelve months is easy to get – It’s on the front page of the BLS’s monthly CPI report. But that doesn’t mean it’s the right number to focus on.
The latest twelve months ignores the total inflation period’s preceding months – the cumulative inflation period results that are fully with us today. That means examining the entire Covid period from January 2020, now entering its fifth year.
Why start then?
Because that is just prior to the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Government flooding the financial system with trillions of new dollars to counter the Covid recession.