Consumer Price Index For All Urban Consumers (CPI-U)
Every month, the Department of Labor releases a new monthly report that most Americans don’t know how to read. But Labor Department analysts keep churning them out from the bowels of a Washington building, hoping and wishing that their parents will hang the Excel files on refrigerators with a gold star and tell their neighbors proudly: “My son works for the Bureau of Labor Statistics.” To which the first neighbor just says, “Nerd.” And the second neighbor replies: “What the heck is the Bureau of Labor Statistics?”
The Bureau of Labor Statistics is in charge of all the government publications and data around most major economic data that you read about each month. Unemployment, consumer prices, inflation, and labor productivity are just a few examples.
One of the things that they produce is the Consumer Price Index For All Urban Consumers (CPI-U).
Because the vast majority of Americans live in dense population centers like cities and suburbs, focusing on those areas makes it more sensible to measure prices of different goods. So they track expenditures for food, energy, clothes, cars, transportation, and every other type of purchase that many Americans make on a day-to-day basis. They track month-to-month price changes, and year-over-year changes.
They even track the change in alcohol costs...which is how the BLS truly justifies its existence.
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Finance: What is the Consumer Price Inde...18 Views
Finance allah shmoop What is the consumer price index or
c p i All right prices They change Five bucks
buys a whole lot less today than it did two
hundred years ago Well here's what Five bucks buys you
today And here's what Five bucks bought you in Seventeen
Ninety three house five horses Nice stuff Well tracking prices
is the key to understanding what inflation is doing in
the world or how much of it we have So
in amalgam of e con experts put together a basket
of goods designed to reflect generally how the average consumer
if there is such a thing feels inflation in their
wallets Will those prices air tracked copiously like monthly ish
and then published as an index number that's evaluated relatively
like if this is last month's cp i which saturday
one hundred seventeen point three two while this month's number
one hundred seventeen point five three shows inflation at a
pace of about two and a half percent annually And
blah blah blah blah So what's in that c p
ay basket that's tracked well there's a bus pass in
a major metro a pound of coffee a half gallon
Carton of milk funeral A flu shot movie tickets And
on and on and on basically all the stuff that 00:01:21.408 --> [endTime] makes life priceless What No