From source to financial context
ACTA DIURNA reporting framework
The context
Coverage includes CPI and PCE inflation, shelter and rents, producer prices, expectations, business surveys, GDP, industrial production, retail sales and real income. The scope therefore includes growth as well as prices. We distinguish the Federal Reserve’s headline PCE inflation objective from the use of core PCE as an analytical measure.
Shelter requires particular care: rents paid across existing leases and newly advertised rents cover different populations and update at different speeds. “Supercore” is not one universal index. A measure must specify its components and weights; subtracting published growth rates from one another does not construct a valid new index.
What we track
Definitions and interpretation below describe our coverage. They are not live readings or mechanical buy/sell instructions.
Headline and core CPI
Changes in the Consumer Price Index, including food, energy, shelter and the index excluding food and energy.
How to read it: Month-to-month and year-over-year rates reveal different horizons. Base effects can lower an annual rate while current monthly pressure accelerates.
Source & methodology ↗PCE inflation
BEA’s consumption price measures, with headline and excluding-food-and-energy versions identified.
How to read it: Different coverage and weighting mean CPI and PCE need not agree. Use one consistent vintage when deriving short-horizon annualized changes.
Source & methodology ↗Producer price pipeline
Final-demand and selected intermediate-demand producer prices, with industry and commodity definitions retained.
How to read it: Input costs can affect margins, final prices or neither immediately. Producer-price changes do not pass mechanically into consumer inflation.
Source & methodology ↗Real income and consumption
Nominal personal income and outlays adjusted using the relevant price measures.
How to read it: Spending can rise in dollars while purchased volume stagnates. Match the deflator and period rather than subtracting unrelated annual headline rates.
Source & methodology ↗Growth and revisions
Real GDP growth, expenditure contributions and successive advance, second and third estimates.
How to read it: A revision changes the understanding of an old period. Chain-weighted dollar components generally cannot be added as if they were ordinary nominal levels.
Source & methodology ↗Expectations and policy response
Survey expectations and market-implied inflation compensation, considered alongside central-bank communication.
How to read it: Breakevens include liquidity and risk premia. A change is not a pure survey of expected inflation and does not prove expectations are unanchored.
Source & methodology ↗How we cover it
Track goods and services separately, the breadth of price increases, shelter lags and the interaction of wages, productivity and margins. Present food and energy shocks even when discussing underlying inflation.
Growth coverage includes industrial production, capacity utilization, retail control measures, purchasing-manager surveys and official GDP. A nowcast is a model estimate, a survey diffusion index is not an output growth rate, and neither replaces a released national-account estimate.
What the numbers can miss
Three- and six-month annualized rates magnify short-term noise; calculate them from compatible index levels and identify the formula.
Consensus surprises need a documented pre-release forecast. The publication will not invent a consensus, interpolate unavailable components or convert old monthly figures into weekly changes.
Sources & editorial context
The original inflation-growth tracker provides this broader scope. No current inflation reading or forecast is embedded in this evergreen guide.
- BLS — Consumer Price Index
- BEA — Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index
- BLS — Producer Price Index
- BEA — Personal income
- BEA — Gross domestic product
- Federal Reserve — Monetary policy
Coverage framework informed by the publisher’s Inflation Tracker reference discussion. Discussions guide the reporting agenda; factual claims and metrics are checked against the identified source institutions.