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The Price Shock, in Bands

U.S. consumer-price inflation, year-over-year, month by month, 2006 to today

Unit
CPI-U inflation (YoY %)
Frequency
Monthly
Coverage
2006–2026
Evidence Quality
High

U.S. consumer price inflation before, during, and after the 2021–22 surge.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics · CPI-U all items · CUUR0000SA0

CPI-U inflation, % year over year · green folds up for positive, grey for deflation

A horizon strip, not a line: inflation is cut into magnitude bands folded onto one shallow strip, so deeper colour means a bigger move and hue carries the sign — green for rising prices, grey for the rare months of falling prices. The strip's baseline is 0%. The deep-green bulge of 2021–22 is the surge; the brief grey patch in 2009 is the post-crisis brush with deflation.

01

Question

Was the 2021–22 inflation surge a genuine break from the low-inflation era, or just a louder version of normal?

02

Evidence

The strip is U.S. CPI-U inflation, year over year, each month since 2006. For most of the span it sits in a shallow green band around 2% — the dormant low-inflation regime — with one grey interruption in 2009, when prices briefly fell (to −2.1%) after the financial crisis. Then 2021–22 is a different animal: the deepest, widest green on the strip, cresting at 9.1% in June 2022 — a four-decade high — before receding to 3.9% by mid-2026.

03

Observation

Read the band depth and colour; further from the baseline reads darker.

Depth is magnitude, hue is sign: a deep-green band is fast inflation, a grey band is outright deflation, and a pale strip is prices barely moving. Read the 2021–22 bulge against the flat 2010s to see the regime break.

04

Assessment

  • The 2010s were genuinely quiet: inflation held a narrow band near 2% for a decade, the pale stretch that makes the 2022 bulge look as stark as it does.
  • 2009 is the one grey patch — a brush with deflation (−2.1%) as the crisis collapsed demand — the mirror image of 2022 and a reminder the risk once ran the other way.
  • The surge is receding but not gone: at 3.9% the latest reading is well off the 9.1% peak yet still above the ~2% the prior decade treated as normal.
05

Advantage

  • How hard did the Fed push rates to break this surge?The Shape of Money
  • Did the same shock show up in another economy's prices?The Return of Inflation
  • How did the surge land on Britain's output?Britain's Lost Month