A week ago Stats Canada published their Consumer Price Index for the year ending May 2015, and the number they published was that the basket of articles that make up the CPI were up 0.9% year over year.
Given that Food is up it’s normal 3.8% year over year, how is the index only up 0.9%? You guessed it, Gas and energy prices (that complete Index was down 11.8% year over year):
- Gasoline was down 17.4% year over year, but that will be changing with Gas prices going back up this month.
- Natural Gas was down 14.4% for the year ending in May as well (not sure about those prices whether they are going up and such).
- It’s not all good news though, Electricity is up 1.0% so not all of the energy index is down
Without this portion of the index, the actual CPI is up 2.2% year over year. More fun with numbers folks.
As this graph shows, the real CPI has been running about 2.0% or higher for a while. To see a better graph on what parts are going up and down, I present this interesting piece of data:
Bank of Canada’s core index
As we all know, the CPI by itself is only data, however, the system that uses this data (or one of them) is the Bank of Canada, and they will adjust interest rates accordingly, if they feel that inflation is “out of control”, so what does the Bank of Canada think ?
The Bank of Canada’s core index increased 2.2% in the 12 months to May, after rising 2.3% in April.
CPI Reports for 2015 so far
The reports for this year so far:
