Parabolic Inflation and “Deficit Hysteria”
by John Rubino on February 16, 2011
One of the disturbing things about trying to understand the US economy is the sense that official statistics don’t match personal experience. They seem to be lying to us …
Courtesy of Phil’s Stock World: the MIT Billion Price Project (brings) modern data mining to bear on consumer prices. As MIT explains its methodology:
Data collection: our data are collected every day from online retailers using a software that scans … public webpages and stores the relevant price information in a database. The resulting dataset contains daily prices on the full array of products sold by these retailers. Our data include information on product descriptions, package sizes, brands, special characteristics (e.g. “organic”), and whether the item is on sale or price control.
The BPP index tracked the US CPI pretty closely at first. But lately the two lines have diverged, with the CPI staying well-behaved and the BPP spiking. …
Icliks Incoming 