One of the final inflation reports that US voters will receive before they determine control of Congress in November
the White House of President Joe Biden engaged in mathematical gymnastics on Thursday to extract some encouraging news from an otherwise depressing inflation data.
At a gathering in Los Angeles, Biden stated that "overall inflation was 2% over the previous three months." It decreased from 11% over the previous three months. That is development.
The White House calculated those numbers by averaging the monthly shift in consumer prices between July and September, a period when fuel costs, a significant factor in the overall index, were down.
But overall inflation is still persistent, coming up at 8.2% in September from a year earlier, scarcely slowing from the previous month's rate.
Additionally, core inflation, which includes the sometimes fluctuating costs of food and energy, rose by 6.6% from September 2021 to a new 40-year high.