The Consumer Price Index rose 7 percent — the highest in four decades. Here are some real-world implications.
No one is dying from rising inflation, but a new report cemented it as one of the grim legacies that defined the U.S. in 2021, along with the Delta and Omicron variants of COVID-19, the attack on the Capitol, and the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. On Wednesday morning, the federal government released the Consumer Price Index, its inflation report, which clocked the December rise in prices as 7 percent higher than they were a year ago, the steepest annual increase since 1982. It’s a remarkable spike for a phenomenon that wasn’t an issue at all at the start of the year, and that most — including Federal Reserve officials — believed was just a passing phenomenon as recently as this fall.
