by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street
Defying economists’ expectations for sixth month in a row, inflation heats up instead of easing off. And it’s a lot worse than it seems.
The Consumer Price Index jumped 0.9% in June from May, after having jumped 0.6% in May, and 0.8% in April – all of them the steepest month-to-month jumps since 2009, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics today. The CPI without the volatile food and energy components (“core CPI”) jumped by 0.8% for the month and by 9.5% for the past three months annualized, the red-hottest “core CPI” since June 1982.
The CPI tracks the loss of the purchasing power of the consumer dollar – everything denominated in dollars for consumers, including what they can buy with their labor – and this dollar has dropped at a rate of 10.7% over the past three months annualized, the fastest drop since June 1982