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Inflation Guy’s CPI Summary (November 2025)
What better way to end this crazy year than with an economic data point that we don’t know how to really interpret? Happy New Year!
Recall that, thanks to the government shutdown, the BLS released September CPI (by recalling workers to calculate the number based on data already collected) but didn’t do any of the normal price-collection procedures for the prices that are normally collected by hand. That’s far less than 100% of the index, but it’s a lot and so the October CPI was not released at all. Which brings us to today, and the November CPI – where the data was mostly collected somewhat normally. However, the calculation procedures had to be adjusted in ways we don’t really know about. You’d think that the way you do this is that you figure out the value that equates to the price level you just measured, and just say ‘hey, that’s a two-month change’ but it isn’t quite that easy. And some very smart people think this could bias the CPI lower for a few months. Whatever they end up doing, the lack of an October number is still going to mess up all the feeds (e.g. from Bloomberg) and all of the scripts and spreadsheets based on those feeds.
The BLS said in a FAQ yesterday that “November 2025 indexes were calculated by comparing November 2025 prices with October 2025 prices…BLS could not collect October 2025 reference period survey data, so survey data were carried forward to October 2025 from September 2025 in accordance with normal procedures.” In other words, November will basically be a 2-month change. (Or so we thought: see below).
Looking back to the last real data we got, in September: recall CPI was weaker than expected, but a big part of that was because of what looked like a one-off in OER. But the breadth of the basket that was accelerating was increasing, which was not a good sign. Normally the OER question would have been answered last month but…oh well.
Coming into the month…we at least have market data!
There was a big drop in short inflation swaps and breakevens this month. A lot of that is due to the steady drop in gasoline prices (see chart below), but some of it may be because sharp-penciled people anticipated that the BLS adjustment for October’s missed data is going to bias the number lower.
And boy, did it. This number is absolute garbage.
There are going to be two eras going forward: pre-shutdown inflation data and post-shutdown inflation data. Much like when there are large one-offs in the data, as in Japan years ago when there was an increase in the national sales tax rate, the year-over-year data for the next year are going to look artificially low. The BLS never adjusts the NSA data ex-post. If it’s wrong, it stays wrong. We can really hope that this doesn’t affect seasonal adjustments when the BLS calculates the new factors for next year, because that would mean next October’s CPI is going to be massively biased upwards.
Because what it looks like is that for many series the BLS didn’t calculate a two-month change based on the current price level – it looks like, especially for housing, they assumed October’s change was zero so that the two-month change reported for this month was actually a one-month change spread over two months. For example, even with the low Owners’ Equivalent Rent print in September, the y/y figure was 3.76%, so about 0.31% per month. The BLS tells us that the two-month change in OER was +0.27%. That looks more than a little suspicious to me.
Largely from that effect, core services inflation dropped from 3.5% y/y to 3.0% y/y in just two months. Riiiiight.
If in fact these two-month changes are all (or mostly) one-month changes, then the data makes a lot more sense. Either way, it’s hard to believe that the y/y change in Health Insurance dropped from 4.2% y/y to 0.57% y/y, thanks to a -2.86% decline in November from September. Yes, the Health Insurance category does not directly measure the cost of health insurance policies, and October is often when the new estimation from the BLS goes into effect, but a monthly -1.43% pre month decline for the next 12 months in Health Insurance is implausible.
Ergo, I’m not going to show most of my usual charts. This is garbage all the way down. Now, in my database instead of having a blank for October as the BLS does (for many but not all series. Seriously this is going to completely mess up any spreadsheet based on pulling data from Bloomberg), I am going to assume the price level adjusted smoothly over those two months – that is, I interpolated between September and November. That’s naïve, but it’s necessary to assume something and that’s better than assuming no change for October!
I have no idea what this will do to Median. If the Cleveland Fed follows the BLS lead, they’ll report a blank for October and a Median of something like 0.24% for the two-month period (that’s what I calculate), but it’s also garbage because garbage-in, garbage-out.
Really, this is a low point for inflation people and a low point honestly for Inflation Guy. I expected more from the BLS. I spend a lot of time defending these guys (heck, I just wrote a column on “Why Hedonic Adjustment in the CPI Shouldn’t Tick You Off”) because the staff involved in calculating the CPI are solid non-partisan professionals (aka pointy-head types) who really are trying to get as close to the ‘right’ answer as actual data allows. I can’t say that’s true in this case. Now, maybe when we get more data we will discover that the economy has abruptly shifted into something like price stability on the way to outright deflation, and it just happened to have a major inflection in October when no one was looking. But to me, it just looks like bad data.
Policymakers still gotta make policy, even if garbage data is all they have. But the correct response to not knowing what’s happening is not to assume you know what’s really happening and act accordingly – the right approach to extremely wide error bars is to do nothing. The correct approach for the Fed is to do nothing until they have another 3-6 months of data and can start getting some confidence about current trends again. That’s not the world we live in. In this world, the Fed will recognize that the inflation data is squirrelly so their behavioral response will be to ignore it and in the policy context that means that they’ll make policy for a while here based solely on the labor market. Get ready for much more market volatility around the Payrolls report again! To me, that looks like it’s likely to be an ease in two of the next three meetings, before the FOMC needs to recognize that the new inflation data is still showing 3-4% inflation. It’s possible that the Committee could take a pause while they wait for the incoming Fed Chair in May. But the inflation data will not be an impediment to an ease, and will no longer be a strong argument for holding the line if growth data looks weak.
I may be being overgenerous here. It’s also possible this will reinforce the FOMC members’ priors since many of them were utterly convinced that inflation was going to drop significantly due to housing. This, in the presence of bad data, would be a pure error. But the result is the same: an easier Fed than is healthy for the monetary system right now.
There are lots of reasons to think that yields further out the curve will stay stable or rise. But yields at the short end should probably reflect easier money going forward.
Sorry I couldn’t be more help. Here’s looking forward to 2026!
Global cc: on a Note About Inflation Confusions
I haven’t written in a couple of weeks – a combination of quiet markets, and a lack of intersection between stuff that’s interesting to write about and my having time to write – but I thought I would “global cc” everyone on something I just wrote in a private email about some common misconceptions regarding the CPI:
A friend and longtime reader (name withheld) writes:
Mike,
I thought you might find these interesting….
davidstockmanscontracorner.com/memo-to-d…
davidstockmanscontracorner.com/inside-th…
My response is below:
Thanks. Unfortunately Stockman doesn’t understand what he’s talking about. He understands better than most, but then he starts saying how the BLS asks homeowners what their homes would rent for…which they do, but only to determine weights, every couple of years, not to determine OER. It says this very clear in a paper on the BLS website called “Treatment of Owner-Occupied Housing in the CPI:”
“To obtain the expenditure weights for the market basket…Homeowners are asked the often-cited question:
If someone were to rent your home today, how much do you think it would rent for monthly, unfurnished and without utilities?
This is the only place where the answers to this question is used; in determining the share of the market basket. We do not use this question in measuring the change in the price of shelter services.”
For that purpose – calculating inflation itself – a survey of actual rents is used. I can understand how the casual observer doesn’t ‘get’ this, but there’s no excuse for Stockman not to know, especially if he is railing about the CPI…he should take some time to understand its main piece.
In short, Stockman writes a good populist screed, but he avoids the main questions:
1. Is headline inflation a better predictor of future inflation than core inflation? Answer: No, even if we can now realize that the rise in energy prices was a permanent feature of the decade ended in 2010, it tells us exactly nothing about whether those are likely to persist. The Fed uses core CPI not because they don’t think people use cars (whenever a columnist uses that silly argument, I know they’re just writing to please a certain audience), but because core CPI is persistent statistically in a way that headline is not. In fact, some Fed statisticians prefer median, or trimmed-mean, neither of which proscribes any particular category. So whining about how the Fed doesn’t include the particular brand of inflation that concerns you misunderstands how and why policymakers actually use measures of inflation in policymaking.
2. Suppose the CPI represents a miserable mis-estimation of actual inflation. Then, pray tell, why does a trillion-dollar market based on that index get priced as if it is accurate? In Argentina, where the inflation numbers are made up, the inflation-linked bonds trade very cheap because they will pay off in a number that is assumed to be too low. And the bond yields are too high by roughly the amount that inflation is assumed to be understated in the future. Markets are efficient, especially big markets. How did the Fed manage to convince at least $1T in private money to misprice the bond market?
3. If the CPI is so wrong, so manipulated, then why to measures of inflation that the government has nothing to do with, like the Billion Prices Project, come up with the same number?
It’s nice that Stockman has a following. And he’s gotten the following partly by ranting about a number people love to hate. That gets him read, but it doesn’t make him right.
Seasonal Adjustment and Springtime Inflation
On Tuesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics will report the CPI index (along with endless other data) for March. Currently, the consensus estimate calls for +0.1%, and +0.1% ex-food-and-energy. This release will generate the usual irritation among conspiracy theorists who believe the government is monkeying with the inflation numbers for their own nefarious ends. I have previously explained why it is that inflation tends to feel faster than it actually is, and I have regularly debunked the claim by certain conspiracy-minded individuals that inflation has been running about 5% faster than the “official” mark since the early 1980s.[1] However, today I want to point out another reason that right now we will have a tendency to recognize that inflation is not rising at 0.1% per month, and that involves the issue of seasonal adjustment.
The point of seasonal adjustment is to remove regular, cyclical influences so that we can see if the underlying trend is doing anything interesting. Consider temperature. Is it particularly helpful for you as a meteorologist to know that the average temperature in April has been higher than the average temperature in January? Of course not, because we know that April is always warmer than January. Hence, with temperature we ask whether April was warmer than a typical April.
Closer to the point, consider gasoline. The national average gasoline price has risen in 61 of the last 66 days, as the chart below (Source: Bloomberg) illustrates.
Yes, if you’re noticing that gasoline prices have been rising you are not alone, and it is not an illusion! But should we worry about this rapid acceleration in gasoline? Does this necessarily presage spiraling inflation? Bloomberg offers an easy way to look at the seasonality question (we formerly had to do this by hand). The following chart shows the change in gasoline prices (in cents) since December 31st for each of the last four years, for the 5-year average (the heavy, yellow line) and for this year (the white line).
You can see that the rise from late January into April is not only normal, but the scale of the increase is just about the same this year as for the prior four years – what was unusual was that prices didn’t start rising until February.
Now, this particular seasonal pattern is important to inflation-watchers and TIPS traders because the volatility of gasoline prices is an important part of volatility in the overall price dynamic. In fact, it is important enough that if I take the average line from the gasoline chart above and overlay it with the official CPI seasonal adjustment factors from the BLS, you can see the ghost of the former in the latter (see chart, source Enduring Investments).
Now, the seasonal adjustment factors for the CPI as a whole are less dramatic (closer to 1, in the chart above, if you look at the right-hand scale compared to the left-hand scale) than are the factors for gasoline, but that makes sense since gasoline is only a small part – albeit a really important part – of the consumption basket of the average consumer. And the BLS methodology is a lot more sophisticated than the simple average-of-the-last-x-years approach I have taken here. But this should be good enough for you to grasp the intuition.
What this means is that when the BLS reports tomorrow that gasoline prices didn’t add anything to overall inflation in March, you should recognize that that does not mean that gasoline prices didn’t rise in March. It means that they didn’t rise significantly more or less than the average factor the BLS is assuming. Most of all, it doesn’t mean that the BLS is monkeying with the data to make it seem lower. The product of the seasonal adjustment factors is (approximately) 1.0, which means that what the BLS takes away in the springtime, to report inflation numbers lower than would be anticipated given a raw sampling of store prices, they will give back in the late fall and winter, and report inflation numbers higher than would be anticipated given a cursory glance of store shelves. What is left, hopefully, is a more-unbiased view of what is happening with the price level generally.
Where you can see this effect most clearly is in the difference between the seasonally-adjusted number that is reported and the rise in the NSA figure that is used to adjust inflation-indexed bonds like TIPS. While the consensus calls for a +0.1% rise in headline CPI, the forecasts expect the NSA CPI (the price level) to rise from 234.781 to 236.017, which is a rise of +0.5%. So yes – if it feels like inflation is suddenly rising at a 6% annualized pace, that is because it is. But fear not, because that will slow down later in the year. Probably.
[1] The summary of that argument: we know that wages have increased roughly 142% since the early 1980s – average hourly earnings was $8.45 in April 1984 and is $20.47 now, and this “feels about right” to most people. Against this, the CPI has risen 128%, meaning that our standard of living “should” have improved a little bit since then, but not much (although any individual may be doing somewhat better or worse). But if prices instead of rising at 2.8%/year had risen at 7.8%/year, prices in aggregate would have risen 851% versus a 142% increase in wages, and we would all be living in absolute squalor compared to our parents. This is offensively and obviously wrong.
Summary of My Post-CPI Tweets
The following is a summary of my post-CPI tweets. You can follow me @inflation_guy.
- Core CPI +0.12%, a bit lower than expected.
- Core 1.56% y/y
- Both core services and core goods decelerated, to 2.2% y/y and -0.4% y/y. This is highly surprising and at odds with leading indicators.
- Accelerating groups: Food/Bev, Housing, Med Care (63.9%). Decel: Apparel, Transp,Recreation, Educ/Comm (32.7%). “Other” unch
- Primary rents fell to 2.82% y/y from 2.88%, OER 2.51% from 2.52%.
- Primary rents probably fell mainly because of the rise in gas prices, which implies the non-energy rent portion is lower.
- …but that obviously won’t persist. It’s significantly a function of the cold winter. Primary rents will be well into the 3s soon.
- Household energy was 0.7% y/y at this time last year; now it’s 5.5%. Again, that slows the increase in primary rents
- Medical Care moved higher again, slowly reversing the sequester-induced decline from last yr. Drugs +1.86% y/y from 0.91% last month.
- Core ex-housing leaked lower again, to only 0.84% y/y. Lowest since 2004. If you want to worry about deflation, go ahead. I don’t.
- The Enduring Inflation Angst Index rose to -0.51%, highest since Nov 2011 (but still really low).
I must admit to some mild frustration. Our call for higher primary rents and owners’ equivalent rents has finally been shown to be correct, as these two large components of consumption have been heading higher over the last few months (the lag was 3-4 months longer than is typical). But core inflation, despite this, has stubbornly refused to rise, as a smattering of small-but-important categories – largely in the core goods part of CPI – are weighing on the overall number.
It is also almost comically frustrating that some of the drag on core CPI is happening because of the recent rise in Natural Gas prices, which has increased the imputed energy component of primary rents. As a reminder, the BLS takes a survey of actual rents, but since utilities are often included in rental agreements the BLS subtracts out the changing value of that benefit that the renter gets. So, if your rent last December was $1,000, and your utilities were $100, and your rent this month is still $1,000 but utilities are $125, then the BLS recognizes that you are really paying $25 less for rent. Obviously, this only changes where price increases show up – in this example, overall housing inflation would be zero, but the BLS would show an increase in “Household Energy” of 25% and a decline in “Rent of Primary Residence” of 2.78% (which is -$25/$900). But “Household Energy” is a non-core component, while “Rent of Primary Residence” is a core component…suggesting that core inflation declined.
There isn’t much we can do about this. It’s clearly the right way to do the accounting, but because utility costs vary much more than rental costs it induces extra volatility into the rental series. However, eventually what will happen is either (a) household energy prices will decline again, causing primary rents to recover the drag, or (b) landlords will increase rents to capture what they see as a permanent increase in utilities prices. So, in the long run, this doesn’t impact the case for higher rents and OER – but in the short run, it’s frustrating because it’s hard to explain!
Now, core inflation outside of housing is also stagnant, and that’s surprising to me. Apparel prices have flatlined after increasing robustly in 2011 and 2012 and maintaining some momentum into mid-2013. Ditto for new cars. Both of those series I have expected to re-accelerate, and they have not. They, along with medical care commodities, are the biggest chunks of core goods in the CPI, which is why that series continues to droop. However, medical care commodities – which was driven lower in 2013 due to the effect of the sequester on Medicare payments – is starting to return to its prior level as that effect drops out (see chart, source BLS).
We will see in a few hours what happens to median inflation. My back of the envelope calculation on the median suggests median CPI might actually rise this month in reverse of last month.
