CPPI - Consumer Patchy Price Index
A Lot Of What's Not In There
December 19th, 2025 - Volume 11 (2025) Missive 148 (Friday)
November’s data brings more questions than answers
Durable goods data continues to confound
Service prices too stable to be believable.
By now, chances are you’ve already been made more than aware that yesterday’s release of the November Consumer Price Index was a bit obtuse. While the November data itself wasn’t necessarily the issue, it was the fact that most of the October data was left unfilled, leaving a rather patchy report that was generally hard to discern. The Bureau of Labor Statistics had forewarned of such an event1 but seeing it come to fruition and actually dealing with the consequences is still something else. As such, we decided to update our normal slew of CPI charts and comment on them individual rather than delve into a long treatise should the numbers change or be replaced as time goes on. Either way, we still see quite a bit of price volatility (not price inflation) in the data itself which means that the Fed still has considerable room to move lower before achieving any sense of real neutrality in this surplus productivity dominated economy.
Both headline measures of CPI were a bit lower on a YoY basis in November.
