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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • It always annoys me when I see something that boils down to ‘nth order derivative flips sign’ where it’s unclear what order derivative the article is even talking about.

    To be clear this is a change in the direction of the trend of the month over month inflation index. So we’re talking about some third order derivative changing sign. Which frankly is about to be expected, at that point any signal is going to be noisy.

    The more down to earth statement is that the month over month inflation was very high and has now stabilized somewhat at around 4.5%ish which is still high (works out to about 70% yearly). It needs to be about a tenth of that.

    Note that the decrease in the month over month inflation is not a sign of things improving. It is a sign of things getting worse at a slightly lower rate than earlier. That’s what annoys me about using such high order derivatives, it obscures the real problem.

    Roughly speaking this article is discussing how far someone has pressed the gas pedal while heading towards a cliff, while the real problem is that they’re pressing the gas pedal (or more urgently they’re heading towards a cliff). Of course that last fact hasn’t changed so they manufacture a news story out of it by finding a derivative that did.