Last week the Consumer Price Index data was released. Very little was made of it at the time. Inflation, officially, peaked during February when it appeared that 3% inflation was close at hand. The problem is that, as this column has published in many articles, the devil is in the seasonal factors. The factors used do not make any sense. Did insurance really take over 5% of our income during 2015 and now, with rising insurance rates, it only takes 1% of our monthly income? Are people forgoing insurance? If we dig into the details we find that inflation is not really . The numbers do not compute. The weighting added up to over 100% for both July of 2016 and July of 2017. If we use the 2016 data and the annual rate of inflation quotes the data shows that we have an inflation rate of 2.77% .

It's the economy.