So now he is making a case that "core inflation" wouldn't be much different if you left out "Owner's equivalent rent". The obvious fallacy is of course that "Owner's equivalent rent" is a concept as flawed as is "core inflation". So taking two absurd "statistics" and working up a new result is well... also yet another absurd result.
So what we have here is a chart that shows that prices excluding food and energy and owner's equivalent rent are equally a non-event in the economy.
Never mind that the well known housing bust has clipped housing values by 25 to 35% nationally. ( About $3 Trillion )
He goes on to say: "...the same downward trend is there if you purge housing from the core index:" The really dumb part of this is of course that it's not housing that is striped from the index... It's what John Q Public thinks that he can get for rent right in the middle of a housing bust!
Krugman should stick to opinion blogging rather than his feeble attempts at explaining economics. Also, anyone reading his crap would be well advised to turn to more credible sources for their information on the status or direction of the economy... Krugman clearly doesn't know what he is writing about!
The chart, graph and table of inflation rates displays annual rates from 2000-2010. Rates of inflation are calculated using the Current Consumer Price Index published monthly by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). For 2010, the most recent monthly data (12-month based) is used in the charts and graphs.
Yes, the latest news suggests improving growth prospects. But we are very deep in the hole, and it would take a lot of growth to get us to anything like full employment. Put it this way: suppose that you assume that the slump has raised the NAIRU to something like 6 percent (which I don’t believe); even so, it would take about five years of growth at 4 percent to get us down to that level.
Market Data 
Markets 
