Should the Fed look at the nominal GDP?
There I was taking my morning walk listening to the newest episode of The Weeds which talked about inflation. It was a good episode talking about how it can be difficult to measure actual inflation and how it can be a difficult gauge for the Federal Reserve to use since it takes a while to collect information meaning that the picture of the world it provides is always out of date. And distorted too since information from different sectors arrive at different times. And the calculations are hard too. If Verizon goes and starts offering unlimited data plans does this mean that data is cheaper, for less inflation? Or are limited and unlimited plans not actually comparable that way? I wrote a little on this way back in 2012 but this stuff is hard. This was all a big problem for all of us back in 2008 when the Lehman Brothers was collapsing. According to the Fed's most recent data high commodity prices were continuing to cause higher inflation than they desired over the last few