Inland Empire inflation - update for November
Statistics show uneven progress
Updates:
1 of 3: The monthly report for December is located below. This is a one-page “flyer-style” version of the newsletter for sharing:
2 of 3: I’ve written up a Jupyter Notebook file to download and process BLS inflation data for the Inland Empire. See here for the file and let me know what you think. I plan on releasing more of these for processing other regional data over the coming weeks/months.
3 of 3: Inland Empire Economic Update is taking a break over the holidays. I’ll be back in 2 weeks from today. Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!
The regional annual inflation rate was 7.5% in November, down from 8.4% at its previous reading in September. This is good news; it finally appears that price growth is slowing down, providing some relief to workers who are still severely crippled by slow income growth and rising costs of living - but some expenditure areas continue to see surprisingly high price growth.
Inflation was pulled down mainly by the “Transportation” expenditure category, as used car and truck prices finally started to recede (-2.1% over the year), although gasoline prices were still up over the year (regular unleaded 14.9%).
Some expenditure categories continue to experience rapid price growth. For example, food prices were up 9.8% over the year in November. Food inflation was dominated by food away from home (up 10.5% year-over-year), rather than food at home (up “only” 9.4%).
While food away from home inflation was higher than food at home, non-durable goods inflation (10.3%) – continues to be higher than services (7.7%) inflation. (Durables inflation, which was high last year, has cooled down considerably [0.8%]). Cereals and bakery products (19.7%), dairy (12.0%), fruits and vegetables (10.2%), and even apparel (8.9%) all saw very high inflation rates.
The shelter expenditure component of inflation - which includes rents - remains high now (8.1%), and is significantly affecting worker’s purchasing power. See the chart above.
In short, while the headline number was a relief to some, inflation in some categories remains stubbornly high, and continues to eat away at any wage gains workers are experiencing.