“…shelter costs, a third of the CPI. Think about the chicken and the egg. If if the Fed lowers rates, you wind up having lower mortgage rates. You wind up having lower CPI, right. So for me, they’re enforcing that higher CPI by not cutting rates. So if you could cut rates a third of CPI comes down, a third of CPI comes down….Used car prices. Why aren’t used car prices moving down? Interest rates. So you have mortgage rates, interest rates for used car prices. Everything that the Fed is doing is fostering higher prices”.

Almost as surprising was that no one challenged this flawed understanding except to object to the use of the transitive rule (if A = B and B = C then A = C). Even CNBC’s famous bond expert Rick Santelli joined the discussion and failed to correct these assertions. (Fortunately, he agrees that inflation is a problem for the Federal Reserve). I am guessing these assertions were not ad hoc and came from somewhere that others consider to be an authoritative source, so I feel compelled to offer a correction.

First of all, the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) started phasing out financing costs from the CPI in the early 1980s. At the time, the Fed was fighting inflation with aggressive rate hikes and the inclusion of financing costs in the CPI made it hard to explain monetary policy. Thus, the current definitions of items in the CPI exclude financing costs both implicitly and explicitly. The BLS describes the inclusions and exclusions for the CPI in “Consumer Price: Concepts” where it explains that “interest costs and finance charges are…out-of-scope”.

Financing Costs Are Not Consumption Goods

Shelter costs are not based on the price of a home or its financing. Instead, the BLS uses Owner’s Equivalent Rent (OER) which is the amount a household would have to pay to rent their home.

“Using the sample of rental units, the CPI program calculates a measure of price change for each CPI index area for the rent and OER indexes. The first step is standardizing the collected rents so that all rents are on a monthly basis. These standardized rents are called normalized rents. The normalized rents are then adjusted for any quality changes such as an additional bedroom or bathroom, changes to the type of heating and cooling equipment, and changes in extra charges such as an increase in total pet fees. The CPI program also adjusts rents for the effect of aging over time. Rents are collected for the same housing units every 6 months. Consequently, each time the CPI observes the rent of a sample unit, it is 6 months older. To account for this aging, an age-bias factor is applied to the previous rent.”

There is nothing in the definition that mentions mortgage rates. The BLS considers the mortgage as part of capital and not consumption.

“Interest costs (such as mortgage interest), property taxes, real estate fees, most maintenance, and all improvement costs are part of the cost of the capital good and are also not treated as consumption items. These non-consumption costs of owned housing are out of scope for the CPI under the cost-of-living framework that guides the index.”

Similarly then, the cost to finance a car, used or new, is also the cost of the capital good and is excluded from the CPI. Here is the core of the BLS’s explanation for measuring the inflation for new vehicles:

“The new vehicles index is estimated using a transactions dataset purchased from J.D. Power that includes observed transaction-level prices and detailed vehicle information. Each observation includes a transaction price as well as a set of 40 variables including rebate values and vehicle characteristics. Sales tax rates are applied by BLS for index calculation….

The BLS also relies on prices from J.D. Power to calculate an inflation rate for used vehicles and does not include financing costs.

Hot and Sticky Inflation

While various pundits torture the data to make specific points about the insignificance or transitory nature of today’s inflation, the core CPI is actually trending higher. The upward trend confirms the bottom telegraphed by the July Beige Book.

Source: U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Personal Consumption Expenditures Excluding Food and Energy (Chain-Type Price Index) [PCEPILFE], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCEPILFE; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: All Items Less Food and Energy in U.S. City Average [CPILFESL], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPILFESL, September 11, 2025.

From my perch, I still see all systems go for hot and sticky inflation. I see only additional inflationary pressures from rate cuts. Turkey learned this lesson, and much of the Federal Reserve acknowledges (or used to acknowledge?) the inflation risks. But we are officially climbing the stairs of hopeful monetary policy…hoping that the rate cuts can heal the employment market faster than it can stoke higher inflation.

Be careful out there!

Full disclosure: no positions

The post Financing Costs Do Not Impact Calculated Inflation appeared first on Inflation Watch.

The lure of the “peak inflation” narrative has been strong since the report on March inflation. The appeal is natural because of the sense that over time all economic conditions revert to the mean (or the average). However, the rush to declare the end of today’s problem with inflation has been particularly meaningful because it occurs in the middle of a desperate, global desire to return to some form of the “normalcy” we (think) we enjoyed before the pandemic. To their credit, various Federal Reserve members tried to soft pedal the idea of peak inflation, including the San Francisco President back in late April. They have remained nearly uniform in their stated resolve to focus on fighting inflation. The path from 8.6% to anything close to the Fed’s comfort zone does not start with hoping for a peak in inflation.

That 8.6% is where the headline Consumer Price Index (CPI) hit in May. Inflation hurtled March’s 8.5% for a new high for this inflationary cycle. The “peak inflation” crowd might now think surely inflation cannot go any higher from here. Perhaps this hope works out this time, but it matters little in the face of persistent and elevated inflation. Moreover, on the same Fast Money episode featuring Eison’s commentary, Lindsey Piegza, chief economist at Stifel, made an excellent point about the lagging nature of the CPI. Piegza pointed out that the worst impacts of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the COVID lockdowns in China have yet to hit the CPI. If so, CPI may not continue to increase, but inflation will remain high for quite some time.

The broad-based nature of the May CPI increases suggests that inflation will indeed remain far above the Fed’s comfort zone for quite some time. Both the month-over-month and, of course, year-over-year inflation numbers were elevated across major categories (numbers are monthly and then year-over-year):

• Food: 1.0% and 8.6%
• Energy: 3.9% and 34.6%
• All items less food and energy: 0.6% and 6.0%
• New vehicles: 1.0% and 12.6%
• Used cars: 1.8% and 16.0%
• Shelter: 0.6% and 5.5%

The persistent rise in shelter costs is particularly notable given the Fed’s sudden sense of urgency on normalizing monetary policy implicitly came from housing costs.

I see at least one lesson from these numbers: inflation will not peak until it peaks. In other words, there is little point in straining the eyes over the horizon seeking the end of this inflationary cycle. Whatever the specific numbers, inflation here in the U.S. and across many nations promises to be persistent and elevated and will frustrate the economic agent who try to act against it without causing other economic fallout.

Be careful out there!

The post Persistently Elevated, Unactionable Inflation appeared first on Inflation Watch.