Mark Zandi

Thanks, Ed.

It's good to be with you.

That number is.

It's a year-over-year growth rate.

And so it reflects the problem the Bureau of Labor Statistics had back in October when they couldn't conduct the survey.

And as a result, they assumed that

no change in prices for the vast majority of goods and services that they include in the CPI.

So if you make an adjustment like we've done, like we did this last month and we did this month to account for that problem, CPI inflation is still 3% year over year.

Core CPI inflation, excluding food and energy,

is 2.9%.

So, you know, once you make the correction for what happened in October, inflation is still elevated and persistently elevated.

Well, there was no data in October.

There was no survey because the government was shut down.

So what does the Bureau of Labor Statistics do?

They assume that prices for the things that they can't measure because there was no survey did not change.

You know, they're very transparent.

They said, you know, I have no idea what the number is because I didn't conduct a survey.

So it's zero.

So that means obviously that's wrong.

We know that's not what happened.