Kelvin Davidson

So some of those things I talked about, electricity and petrol and stuff, that measure was two and a half percent.

And now that was unchanged from Q3.

So, you know, if you want to look at that measure as your definition of core inflation, it was still kind of OK, you know.

maybe you'd want to see it closer to two or even a little bit below but two and a half percent still within target so that's sort of good there's another measure they put out called a trimmed mean which basically means you put all your goods and services in order of the ones that went up the most and the ones that went up the least and you take off a certain

number from the top and a certain number from the bottom and then take your cpi or your inflation measure so um you know you can take off the top 20 or the top whatever you want um but a couple of the numbers in there if you do what's called a 20 trim means so you take off 10 from the top and 10 from the bottom so you're taking off 20 in total uh that measure not ideal it went up from 2.4 to 2.7 so you know that's kind of reflecting that

that overall increase at the headline level, but 2.7% still within target, maybe you don't get too concerned about that.

A 10% trim, for example, if you take off 5% from the top, 5% from the bottom, that measure went from 2.6 to 2.9, so that's getting closer to the top of that target band.

Yeah, I don't know.

That's a few of the measures.

Depends.

And Reserve Bank has their own ones, which I'm not necessarily familiar with, but they must do a whole bunch of stuff behind the scenes to

add certain things in and take other things out and so i guess yeah where am i left it you know strikes me that you could put in whatever you want and take out whatever you want as well and you know it's the whole thing if you know my cricket batting average if i took out all my ducks i'd be you know don bradman or so you know i think there's a limit to what you want to do here i mean you know it

you can fiddle statistics any way you want um but so so i think there's a balance you know you probably want to ignore some one-offs but you don't necessarily want to ignore them all the time and let's face it we've still got headline overall cpi inflation 3.1 so and that's above the reserve bank's target and they're not they're not tasked with um keeping some measure of core inflation within target over the medium term it's headline cpi inflation and at the moment is above target so um

Yeah, there's lots of things to weigh up.

And I mean, I've already said the legs, you know, let's not panic about one number above target for now, because it's been a deep recession.

There's still capacity in the economy.

You know, inflation should come down.

So, yeah, I'm sort of there's lots to weigh up.

I mean, for me, I still I'm always a wee bit cautious of taking out the stuff that's inconvenient, you know, and focusing too much on

on whatever measure of core inflation you have.