On the sub­ject of US in­fla­tion, the met­ric I watch is the "MCT Inflation" fig­ure: "Multivariate Core Trend" in­fla­tion, what I think of as mon­e­tary in­fla­tion as op­posed to price vari­abil­ity in­fla­tion. https://​www.​newyorkfed.​org/​research/​policy/​mct#​-​-​:mct-​inflation:tren​d-​inflation This met­ric is based on the no­tion that the change in prices for any good is best thought of as a mix­ture of an across-the-board com­mon in­fla­tion fac­tor for the pe­riod across all goods, plus a fac­tor spe­cific to that prod­uct or ser­vice. So, for 100 cat­e­gories of things, you have 101 in­fla­tion fig­ures: one for each good, and one to rule them all. MCT is the com­mon fac­tor, which can be thought of as the amount by which a dol­lar has lost gen­eral pur­pose pur­chas­ing power, rather than the move­ment in the price of any sin­gle thing, or the change in a bas­ket which con­tained one thing that changed a lot.
  The Fed finds some use for this be­cause it tends to be pretty smooth and con­sis­tent, so it tends to pre­dict it­self (and there­fore gen­eral in­fla­tion) bet­ter than head­line or core CPI or PPI fig­ures. That's the "T" in the name, as it cap­tures the trend. I use it be­cause, not being in the US, I'm in­ter­ested in whether the US dol­lar is hold­ing its value, not whether it costs more or less for some­one in Dubuque to fill up their tank or buy a dozen eggs, which are mostly a product-specific is­sues.
  I men­tion all this be­cause the lat­est pub­lished fig­ure is MCT in­fla­tion of 2.67% in the year to July. Rather sur­pris­ingly this is the low­est monthly fig­ure since Jan­u­ary 2021, just two months into the be­gin­ning of the in­fla­tion up­surge.
  The main cat­e­gories going into all the mea­sure­ments are goods, ser­vices, and hous­ing. Hous­ing is not con­tribut­ing and has­n't re­ally for the last year and a half. Goods and ser­vices are roughly tied in their con­tri­bu­tion to the lat­est 2.67%, and both have been fall­ing for at least 3 months now.
  Of course, it's pos­si­ble that it won't stay low. There is one thing that cor­re­lates with fu­ture moves: money. I note that Di­visia M3, my pre­ferred money sup­ply met­ric, has been slowly ac­cel­er­at­ing for a while now. After the pan­demic, the spike in Di­visia M3 pre­dicted the in­fla­tion spike with 8 months ad­vance, so it's not nec­es­sar­ily true that money sup­ply has no mean­ing for in­fla­tion in the mod­ern world. Two years ago Di­visia was ris­ing at 2.04%. Four years ago it was ris­ing at 1.73%, pretty sim­i­lar. But the lat­est print, based on data to June, is 6.83%. The year-on-year fig­ures have been very slowly ris­ing since Feb 2024. There are many mov­ing parts to mon­e­tary in­fla­tion, but this would seem to be a slight up­ward pres­sure in the mix.
  Pos­si­ble bot­tom line spec­u­la­tion from those two ob­ser­va­tions: US mon­e­tary in­fla­tion, in the sense of what a dol­lar is ac­tu­ally worth, is prob­a­bly lower than you thought lately. But that might not last...it might be ris­ing a lit­tle faster within a year.
  Jim