Analyst Wolf Richter at wolfstreet.com did a deep dive into the details of this week’s inflation report and what he found wasn’t pretty.
While the headline CPI and even the core CPI weren’t worse than expected, Richter found that the CPI for ‘services’ was a “nightmare”, which “spiked relentlessly” to its highest increase since October of 1982.
Services make up the vast majority of the U.S. economy and are now the main driver of inflation.
A part of CPI is the large “food at home” category, which spiked to its worst level since February of 1979 at 13.5%.
Food inflation is particularly worrisome because it hits low and middle-income households the most since they spend a relatively bigger part of their budgets on food. (Chart from wolfstreet.com)
