How can inflation be only a few percentage points and yet many goods and services are up over 50% since 2019?

Question

How can inflation be only a few percentage points and yet many goods and services are up over 50% since 2019?

In: 187

Answer 1

The problem is that inflation is a catch all conglomerate used to look at a lot of index items from utilities and food to TV’s and cars.

So you can have some items that can be near zero or even negative but other items way above 100% and still end up with a inflation that’s relatively low

For example

Cars, televisions, phones and such are all barely up in price at all , most are nearly zero change but food may be up 60% , so we end up with 60+ 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 all divided by 6 after showing an effective inflation rate of 10%