Deflating the deflation talk

Here are three different looks at the consumer price inflation data. The blue line is the "headline" or main index; the green line is the CPI less food and energy; and the red line is the Cleveland Fed's measure of the change in the "median" item in the CPI basket, which results from excluding those prices that rise and fall the most. Both the median CPI and the Core CPI continue to rise, which suggests that there has been very little pass-through of falling energy prices to prices as a whole. Most prices, in other words, are still rising; inflation is not dead, and we are a long way from anything that might be termed a true deflation.