A mutual fund presented yesterday, and it seemed like I was in 2003-2006 all over again as they discussed the inflationary tinder and told anecdotes about avocado prices and other foods, referenced Friedman quotes, and reminisced about boyhood in the inflationary 70s.

I went back to my desk and immediately tried to fire up my old Shiny/d3 CPI graphs. Unfortunately though I got an error, since the BLS changed from ftp to http on March 1, 2014. Intead of fixing the old, I completely rewrote the chart with rCharts and d3.js again using this nice example from @syntagmatic. This still needs work. The multiple series with same name are from the different BLS areas. I'll try to make that into a separate Angular filter.

When someone starts talking about abstruse food prices, use this handy CPI component graph, or quandl offers some difficult to find food prices with a great API and even packages for almost every language and Excel.

Question in My Mind

If "Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output" (Friedman 1970) then what is deflation?