For those who like to delve into the soup and nuts of fundamentals the ECB has a guide on inflation.
Aside from the basic sums of calculating inflation it delves into the actual weightings. The numbers collected are pretty large and show the scale that the statos go to to get the information.
“Collecting prices – Every month, around 1.8 million prices are collected by price observers in more than 200,000 shopping outlets. This happens in nearly 1,600 cities and towns across the euro area. Prices are collected in each country for, on average, around 700 representative goods and services. The exact number of items sampled differs from country to country. For each product, several prices are collected from different outlets and in different regions.Example: book prices take account of various categories of books (fiction, non-fiction, reference, etc.) sold in book shops, supermarkets and by internet suppliers.”
A lot on the guide is school level stuff but it’s worth a quick gander if you want to refresh yourself and see some historical stats and calculations.
If you’re really lazy you can just watch the free cartoon
The main cartoon will be starting in just over 30 minutes. You can see all your favourite characters live from the Frankfurt studio here
Missing – Inflation monster. If found please return to ECB, Frankfurt, Germany
