Question Request: February 2023
What better way to Celebrate Valentine's Day?
Happy Valentine’s day, readers. We here at Sage Economics hope the 52% of you celebrating have a positively steamy one, while the 48% of you who don’t enjoy the $25.9 billion you collectively won’t spend today. If you want to dive a little deeper into the economics of Valentine’s day, the National Retail Federation has this nice dashboard.
We’re of the opinion that there’s nothing sexier than an economics-based Q&A, so please, make like Cupid unleashing a barrage of heart-tipped arrows and shoot us your questions for our February Q&A post (by leaving a comment or replying to this email). We got so many good questions for January’s Q&A that we had to break it up into part I (by Zack) and part II (by Anirban).
New inflation data comes out in about two minutes; unlike the rest of Valentine’s Day, we hope it’s cooler than expected. We’ll cover that and all the other most recent indicators in our Week in Review column on Friday. Week in Review is just for paid subscribers; if that’s not you and you want it to be, treat yourself to a special Valentine’s Day treat: paid subscriptions are 33% off today only.
As unemployment remains low, and inflation elevated (though decelerating), should we pause all of our recession fears and enjoy the expansion of the economy?
Hello. I have a question about the good/bad of the last inflation numbers. Two questions actually - both related to natural gas.
Q1) I see that the cost for heating of natural gas was the highest (or one of the highest) inflationary items. If we removed this item from the inflation index (I think it's called the CCI?) how would we have faired?
Q2) For my personal gas bill jumped from $24 Dec-2022 to $76 Jan-2023 even though I have (almost) consumed the same amount of fuel (I live in Southern California). Further, I own shares of natural gas in my portfolio (UNG to be exact). And on the commodities market, natural gas, like UNG is at an all time low (I looked back to 2010). What causes such a disconnect between the cost to the consumer to heat their home and the price on the commodities market that can explain such a gross increase as 300%?