A year of soaring prices, in charts
The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) rose 6.5 percent over the 12 months ending December 2022, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported, and by year’s end, real, inflation-adjusted wages had fallen for most US workers.
For many families, it was the worst cost-of-living squeeze in four decades. Some critics of the Federal Reserve counter that the 2022 tightening was a policy overreaction to transitory inflation, the mirror image, they argue, of 2009, when the United States experienced sustained deflation throughout the year.
The yardsticks themselves kept moving: the CPI shelter component was reweighted in the 2023 basket revision, complicating comparisons across years.