Jack Salmon writes about the August inflation report:
Declining headline inflation is good news, but neither the Federal Reserve nor Congress is off the hook just yet — inflation is still very much out of control. Since the headline CPI primarily reflects transitory fluctuations in the prices of the supply of goods, the declines seen in recent months can be chalked up to the 20 percent drop in the price of oil since June — and not to the Fed’s tightening its belt.
The Fed knows this and will be more concerned with core CPI, the metric that reflects the non-transitory components of inflation by excluding food and energy prices, which fluctuate with supply volatility. Core CPI rose from 5.9 percent in July to 6.3 percent in August. It has been persistently elevated around 6 percent since the start of the year and remains at almost double the rate of Euro Area core inflation, and almost three times the 2015–2019 U.S. average.
In competition policy, it is not enough to say that a company has a monopoly. One must ask: a monopoly over what? Defining a company’s relevant market is a core question in every antitrust case. The relevant-market fallacy is defining that relevant market so narrowly that it makes a company look more dominant than it really is.
Any market is a monopoly if you define it narrowly enough. Antitrust enforcers have an incentive to push market definitions in this direction as far as they think they can get away with. It makes their case look stronger, even if that strength is only semantic.
Antonella Marty writes about inflation in Argentina:
Argentina’s annual inflation rate now exceeds 70 percent — a 30-year high. Its monthly inflation (just under 8 percent) is comparable to the U.S.’s annual inflation, with prices rising so much that the country’s central bank recently hiked interest rates to 69.5 percent.