Finance & economics | CPI v PCE

Inflation in America soars to 8%. Or is it more like 6%?

The Fed’s preferred price gauge is more benign but also more obscure

Fuel prices at a Chevron gas station in San Francisco, California, US, on Thursday, June 9, 2022. Stratospheric Fuel prices have broken records for at least seven days with the average cost of fuel per gallon hitting $4.96 as of June 8, according to the American Automobile Association. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
|WASHINGTON, DC

The federal reserve’s “preferred measure of inflation” is a phrase that often crops up in reporting on the American economy. It stands in for a verbose official name: the personal-consumption-expenditures price index (pcepi). Most discussion of inflation, however, focuses on its better-known and pithier relative, the consumer-price index (cpi).

This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline “The price of accuracy”

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