Saturday, October 23, 2010

September 2010 CPI: Eat And Be Merry

Yesterday’s Consumer Price Index report from DOS was interesting, in a nice kind of way. I would have expected that over the Ramadhan-Syawal period, we’d see some increases in food prices at least – apparently not (log annual and monthly changes; 2000=100; click on pic for larger version):

01_index

The overall price level was flat, which hid some funny goings on – clothing jumped almost a full point and restaurant and hotel prices jumped 0.4% over the previous month, while transport costs fell and food prices ended up flat as well. As a result, core inflation rose slightly while the pain index fell.

Whether this is a break in the trend or a temporary anomaly, isn’t something that we can infer from just a single data point. But it does reinforce the notion that price pressures are subdued in the economy right now.

Technical Notes:

September 2010 CPI Report from the Department of Statistics

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