Consumer confidence in current economic conditions

For NYT Opinion, Nate Silver compares consumer confidence between two surveys. The University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment focuses more on personal spending, whereas the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Survey. Usually, the estimates follow each other, but there’s been a split the past few years, as shown in the difference chart above.

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Inflation high, cost of living no good

Usually inflation is more of a slow thing that you don’t notice so much until you think back to the time when a burger was only a dollar. Prices increased much faster over the past few years though. For Bloomberg, Reade Pickert and Jennah Haque zoom in on the everyday items that are noticeably more expensive. Basically everything.

I just wrapped up travel in a high cost of living area. The sticker shock on a simple grocery bill was brutal.

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Breaking down the higher price on a restaurant receipt

If you’ve eaten at a restaurant lately, you might have noticed a substantially higher bill than you’re used to. You’d be right to assume that it’s because of things like inflation and pandemic-induced prices, but you might not realize how much the cost of ingredients, labor, and a new takeout business model has gone up for restaurants. Priya Krishna and Umi Syam, for The New York Times, redesigned a single receipt to show a more detailed breakdown.

The receipt presentation and color-coded scrolling are tops. It’s a well-made table that works with the copy to highlight items.

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Inflation based on your spending

We’ve been hearing a lot about inflation rates lately on a national scale. However, how inflation impacts you depends on what you spend your money on. Ben Casselman and Ella Koeze for The New York Times provide an estimate for you.

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Price increases people have noticed

Inflation is high. For NYT’s The Upshot, Emily Badger, Aatish Bhatia and Quoctrung Bui busted out the word cloud to show the price increases people noticed in February. As you might expect, the things that people purchase more often appear higher on the list, because the changes are easier to track.

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Inflation explained with eggs

The prices of everything seem to be rising a lot lately. Why? For Vox, Emily Stewart uses eggs as a case study to explain:

“There are different ways of thinking about the inflation issue, and economists by default tend to think about macroeconomic issues such as inflation in macroeconomic terms,” said Isabella Weber, an economist at UMass Amherst. “In this current situation that we are facing, we basically have very strong micro dynamics, that is dynamics on the level of specific sectors that translate into a more general kind of price pressure.”

Eggs don’t paint the full inflation picture in the US, but they do a part of it — it’s more expensive to feed chickens and move eggs around, so it’s more expensive to produce and move eggs, so it’s more expensive for consumers to buy eggs.

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Inflation in the context of age generations

When you compare the price of things today against prices one year ago, almost everything increased in cost at a rapid rate. While out of the ordinary, it’s definitely not the first time this happened. The New York Times zoomed out to show year-over-year price change since 1960, framing the timeline in the context of age generations.

Zoom into the data super close, and every blip can seem like a mountain. Zoom out for a better sense of scale.

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Inflation isn’t that exciting

For NYT Opinion, Josh Bivens and Stuart A. Thompson argue that you don’t need to panic about inflation:

It may surprise many Americans that even during times of strong growth and very low inflation (like the late 1990s) or weak growth and low inflation (like the years following the Great Recession), more than half of all goods and services are usually experiencing price increases. In part, this is because it is awfully hard for employers to cut nominal wages, even in a recession. And economists see some mild, steady economy-wide inflation as a sign of a healthy economy. The Fed, for instance, actively targets an average overall inflation level of 2 percent per year.

I like the mini visual cues in the body text so that you don’t have to scroll or refer back to the full chart to see what they’re talking about.

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