WASHINGTON, D.C. – Rapidly-rising inflation which is hitting levels that the United States hasn’t seen in 40 years has been sucking nearly $300 extra from the monthly budget of the average American family, a recent analysis has revealed.
According to the release of the latest U.S. Labor Department data, consumer prices jumped 7.9 percent in February 2022; this is in comparison to the average spending of families in 2018 and 2019, when inflation was approximately 2.1 percent.
The Consumer Price Index (CPI) – the price of a weighted average market basket of consumer goods and services purchased by households – increased 2.5 percent over the course of the last six months, which experts say is a huge amount of growth. In February alone – prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine – the CPI jumped an additional 0.8 percent.
In addition, energy costs in February increased 3.5 percent after going up 0.9 percent in both December and January.
Ryan Sweet, a senior economist at Moody’s Analytics, noted that the Federal Reserve will most likely take action in order to mitigate the nation’s inflation before it reaches truly harmful levels.
“There is no doubt that the Federal Reserve will increase the target range for the fed funds rate later this month as higher energy prices are making the central bank’s problems even worse,” Sweet said. “The Fed will respond.“
Partly due to increasing gas prices, inflation in the United States in February reached its highest levels in 40 years, with the CPI rising 7.9 year-over-year and inflation rising 0.8 percent month-over-month; this represents the fastest increase in inflation since February 1982, at which time it was 7.6 percent.
Reports say that, from January to February, practically every type of good or service increased in price, with the 6.6 percent increase in gas prices causing approximately 35 percent of all price jumps. In addition, grocery prices went up 1.4 percent – with fruit and vegetable prices jumping 2.3 percent – and the average price of gas – which the Biden Administration has repeatedly blamed on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – reached $4.31 per gallon on Thursday.
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