Lake County Ohio Weal

  STATISTA: What Categories Have Been Hit Hardest by Inflation? by  Felix Richter,   Nov 15, 2024 Despite inflation cooling to the lowest level in more than three years in recent months, there's no way around the fact that consumer prices in the United States have risen sharply over the past three years, as several factors came together to form a perfect storm of inflationary pressures. Since February 2020, the last month before the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted the global economy, the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) has increased 21.7 percent. Assuming the Fed’s targeted 2-percent inflation rate, prices would only have increased by 9.7 percent during that period, illustrating how severe the recent inflation surge has been. More importantly though, prices are going to remain elevated even if inflation returns to its target level of 2 percent, meaning that the effects of the inflation crisis will linger. Not all prices are created equal, however, and wh...

  STATISTA: Soft Landing Completed? by  Felix Richter,   Nov 15, 2024 With U.S. GDP growing 2.8 percent in the third quarter, unemployment still remarkably low at around 4 percent and inflation falling towards the Fed’s 2-percent target in recent months, the U.S. economy is doing quite well on paper. In fact, it looks like the long-coveted “soft landing”, i.e. taming inflation without a drastic increase in unemployment or a full-blown recession, is almost completed . And yet, frustration with the economy, and high prices in particular, is one of the reasons why Donald Trump and Republicans won the election so emphatically. Speaking about the disconnect between the actual state of the economy and people’s perception of it, Fed chairman Jerome Powell recently acknowledged t he hardship many Americans are going through, saying that they have every right to feel the way they feel. “We say that the economy is performing well, and it is, but we also know that people are still f...