The recent surge in commodity prices has rekindled interest in their power to predict consumer price inflation. But is this interest warranted? In examining the empirical relationship between commodity prices and consumer price inflation, this article finds that commodities' reputation as useful...

Over the long term, steady job growth requires low and stable inflation. In this special issue of Forefront, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland President Sandra Pianalto explains why price stability is essential for maximum employment and how the adoption of a numerical target for inflation may...

The recent run-ups in oil and other commodity prices and their implications for inflation and monetary policy have grabbed the attention of many commentators in the media. Clearly, higher prices of food and energy end up in the broadest measures of consumer price inflation, such as the Consumer...

This paper examines the inflation "pass-through" problem in American monetary policy, defined as the relationship between changes in the growth rates of individual goods and the subsequent economy-wide rate of growth of consumer prices. Granger causality tests robust to structural breaks are...

This paper reinvestigates the performance of trimmed-mean inflation measures some 20 years since their inception, asking whether there is a particular trimmed mean measure that dominates the median CPI. Unlike previous research, we evaluate the performance of symmetric and asymmetric...

According to some, the saying "everybody complains about the weather, but nobody ever does anything about it" could be just as easily applied to the consumer price index. But what should be done?

Almost everyone uses the word inflation to refer to any increase in prices, but it ought to be reserved for a just one kind of price increase. True inflation has a different cause—and a different cure—than the price increases of goods and services caused by constantly changing supply and...

An argument that the central bank should adopt a policy of price stability based on an explicit objective for the Consumer Price Index, which the Cleveland Fed President believes would provide a nominal anchor for the dollar as well as a clear standard by which to measure the success of monetary...

At a time when many Americans worry about rising prices, Dallas Fed Senior Economist Jim Dolmas discusses the numbers we use to track inflation in the U.S. economy.