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Showing posts from August, 2026

CPI September 2026: Shelter Raised Core Inflation and Lowered the 3.7 Percent Headline

On October 14, 2026, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the Consumer Price Index rose 3.7 percent in the 12 months through September, while the index excluding food and energy, the core rate, rose 2.6 percent after 2.4 percent through August. Shelter, the largest single block in both measures, rose 3.2 percent over the same 12 months. For anyone reading the two rates side by side, that one component pushes them in opposite directions: it lifts core from 2.0 percent to 2.6 and holds the all-items rate at 3.7 instead of 4.0, so the claim that housing is pushing inflation up is true of one number and false of the other. The figures come from the BLS Consumer Price Index news release for September 2026 and its first three tables. This post follows the shelter line through them: what the index counts as shelter, why September's monthly shelter increase of 0.4 percent is not a rent number, and how much of each 12-month rate shelter accounts for once the rounding comes off. T...
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Which Estimate Counts When a 241 Billion Dollar Statistical Discrepancy Separates GDP From GDI

Two Estimates of One Quarter, and a 241 Billion Dollar Gap On August 26, 2026, the Bureau of Economic Analysis published its second estimate of second-quarter output. Real gross domestic product increased at an annual rate of 1.5 percent . Real gross domestic income increased 2.2 percent . The average of the two, which BEA also publishes, increased 1.8 percent . These are not three views of three different things. They are three arithmetic treatments of one quarter. GDP counts what was spent on final output. GDI, in BEA's glossary, is "the costs incurred and the incomes earned in the production of gross domestic product (GDP)" ; BEA's primer on the accounts lists its four components as "compensation of employees," "taxes on production and imports less subsidies," "net operating surplus," and "consumption of fixed capital." In the national accounting framework the two totals are definitionally equal. The difference between...
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Electricity Prices and Data Center Load: Where the June 2026 EIA Tables Stop

The Electric Power Monthly released on August 26, 2026 put the U.S. residential average price of electricity at 18.34 cents per kilowatthour for June 2026, against 17.47 cents in June 2025, a rise of 4.98 percent. The all-sector average over the twelve months ending June 2026 was 14.05 cents, against 13.22 cents a year earlier — a move of 0.83 cents , or 6.3 percent. The argument around those numbers has narrowed to one question: whether new data center load moved them. That question is being asked of a table that was not built to answer it. The series can be pushed far — far enough to say what did and did not mechanically move the national average — but not that far. The published price is a ratio, not a rate EIA defines the figure directly, and the underlying collection is Form EIA-861M. Average revenue per kilowatthour is "calculated by dividing the total monthly revenue by the corresponding total monthly sales for each sector and geographic area." It is not a tari...
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How Fast the Interest Cost of the Federal Debt Reprices

Two numbers, published by two different parts of the U.S. government, sit more than a percentage point apart. The Treasury reports that the average interest rate across all interest-bearing federal debt was 3.447% at the end of July 2026. The Federal Reserve's H.15 release for 25 August 2026 puts the ten-year Treasury yield at 4.64% and the two-year at 4.17% . The government is paying, on the whole stock of what it owes, well under what the market is currently charging on new money. The comparison is not quite like for like, and the ways in which it is not are the interesting part. One number is a month-end average across every security outstanding, including debt issued a decade ago at coupons that no longer exist in the market. The other is a single day's quote on new money. That gap is not an anomaly and it is not a mistake in either figure. It is what a stock looks like when it is measured against a price. What is worth measuring is how fast the first number moves t...
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A Foreign Reserves Total Is One Number. Its Disclosure Template Has Four Sections.

A central bank publishes a reserves figure once a month. Wire copy carries it as a single number with a month-on-month change attached, analysts turn it into months of import cover, and sovereign credit commentary cites it as a buffer. Very little of that engages with a basic fact: the number is one line of a four-section statistical return, and the other three sections exist because that one line was once shown to be misleading. The return is the IMF's Data Template on International Reserves and Foreign Currency Liquidity, usually shortened to IRFCL. It was folded into the Special Data Dissemination Standard in March 2000, four years after the SDDS itself was established, and the reason is not obscure. In its own retrospective on the 1997–98 programmes in Indonesia, Korea and Thailand, the IMF wrote that gross reserves were a poor indicator of available international liquidity given the magnitude of liabilities set against these reserves, many appearing off-balance sheet , and ...
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