{"id":79882,"date":"2025-08-13T15:06:13","date_gmt":"2025-08-13T15:06:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/79882\/"},"modified":"2025-08-13T15:06:13","modified_gmt":"2025-08-13T15:06:13","slug":"why-is-inflation-worse-in-some-areas-than-others","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/79882\/","title":{"rendered":"Why is inflation worse in some areas than others?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Overall inflation held steady at 2.7% on an annual basis, according to the July consumer price index<\/a>. Core inflation \u2014 that\u2019s prices excluding food and energy \u2014 rose to 3.1% per year. <\/p>\n

But that\u2019s the wide-angle picture of the whole country. Zoom in on your local slice of the economy and the picture may look very different, depending on where you live. In San Diego, for instance, inflation is running<\/a> at 4%. In Dallas, it\u2019s less than 1%.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s pretty normal for inflation to vary across the U.S., because it\u2019s normal for prices to vary. Especially for housing<\/a>, which makes up about a third<\/a> of the CPI. <\/p>\n

Of course, housing trickles down into many other parts of the index.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople have to get paid more to live in some of these more expensive cities and so services that require a lot of labor also tend to be more expensive,\u201d said Jed Kolko, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. <\/p>\n

But there might be some other forces behind the differences in price changes. Like tariffs. <\/p>\n

\u201cWest Coast imports are largely coming from Asia. Asian imports right now are being hit with harder, higher tariffs than other places in the globe,\u201d said Matt Colyar, an economist at Moody\u2019s Analytics.<\/p>\n

Proximity matters to both goods and to specific types of workers, said Caroline Fohlin, an economist at Emory University.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you have a big immigration crackdown and you\u2019re in an area that depends heavily on immigrant labor<\/a>, for example, hospitality industry, meatpacking, agriculture, those prices for labor are going to go up,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Big picture though, Fohlin said local spikes in inflation are often short-lived.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you look at the metro areas you\u2019ll see that there\u2019s a lot of volatility in the inflation rates across cities,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Because swings in the economy \u2014 with housing, tariffs and the labor force \u2014 hit different places in the economy at different times. And usually, at some point, they make their way through all the other regions.<\/p>\n

Jed Kolko at the Peterson Institute said that\u2019s why macroeconomists keep an eye on regional data.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey look at price trends, they look at labor market trends, they look at everything happening with local housing markets,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

They can use that data to try to understand what\u2019s coming to the rest of the country.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Overall inflation held steady at 2.7% on an annual basis, according to the July consumer price index. Core…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":79883,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[28,56131,9970,101,2402],"class_list":["post-79882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-consumer-price-index-cpi","tag-consumer-prices","tag-economy","tag-inflation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79882"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79882\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/79883"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}