HAPPY DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN! Inflation “only” 8.5% in July. Yay! All credit to the sage in the White House!

Wait, what?

Even with the lower-than-expected numbers, inflation pressures remained strong.

The jump in the food index put the 12-month increase to 10.9%, the fastest pace since May 1979. Even with the monthly drop in the energy index, electricity prices rose 1.6% and were up 15.2% from a year ago. The energy index rose 32.9% from a year ago. . . . Shelter costs, which make up about one-third of the CPI weighting, continued to rise and are up 5.7% from a year ago.

Well, uh, it’s still great news because . . . economists expected 8.7%!

Plus: “While inflation has been accelerating, gross domestic product declined for the first two quarters of 2022. The combination of slow growth and rising prices is associated with stagflation, while the two straight quarters of negative GDP meets a widely held definition of recession.”

UPDATE: July CPI report: Inflation dips to 8.5%, flat month-on-month — but why? “This is still the fifth straight month that overall CPI inflation has remained above 8%. Core CPI has been above 5% for ten straight months, and is flattening out around 6% over the last three months. Those are not good signs, especially when considering that all of these reports are compounding on high inflation rates from a year ago. . . . And on top of that, inflation’s persisting into what looks like a looming recession, if it has not yet arrived.”

But it’s all good news in the press, and will remain so until November.