What the inflation prints actually measure, how to read core-versus-headline, sticky-versus-flexible, and the market-implied path embedded in breakevens and inflation swaps.
Core PCE is the Personal Consumption Expenditures price index excluding food and energy, the Federal Reserve's preferred gauge of underlying US inflation. It strips volatile food and energy prices to reveal the persistent trend that informs the FOMC's 2% target, measured on the broad PCE basket rather than the narrower CPI.
Fiscal dominance is a regime in which government debt and deficits constrain monetary policy, forcing the central bank to keep rates lower, tolerate higher inflation, or monetize debt to preserve sovereign solvency — subordinating price stability to the fiscal authority's financing needs rather than the reverse.
A relative-value framing that decomposes a nominal Treasury yield into its two priced components—a real (TIPS) yield and a breakeven inflation rate—and asks which is mispriced. Expressing a view on "breakevens versus nominals" isolates the market's compensation for expected inflation from the real-rate path.
Cheapflation is the pattern in which the cheapest varieties of a product category inflate faster than premium varieties, compressing the price gap between budget and high-end options. Because lower-income households concentrate spending on these cheap tiers, cheapflation makes their effective inflation rate exceed headline measures built on average baskets.
Cost-push shocks are inflationary impulses originating on the supply side — rising input costs, tariffs, wages, or energy prices — that lift the price level independent of demand. They worsen the output-inflation trade-off, forcing central banks to choose between accommodating higher prices or contracting activity.
The deflation method is the procedure national statisticians use to convert nominal trade or output values into real (volume) terms by dividing through by an appropriate price index. The granularity of the price deflators applied — broad group versus narrow item level — materially changes the resulting real estimate.