FILE - Plastic bottles of Pepsi are displayed at a grocery store in New York on Nov. 15, 2023. Before inflation began heating up, a 2-liter bottle of soda it cost an average of $1.67 in supermarkets across America. Three years later it is going for $2.25 – a 35% increase.FILE - A carton of eggs sits on a kitchen counter on March 17, 2023, in East Derry, N.H. Egg prices are 43% higher than they were three years ago.
Or egg prices. They soared in 2022, then fell back down. Yet they’re still 43% higher than they were three years ago. At least prices are now rising more slowly — what’s called disinflation. On Friday, for example, the government said a key price gauge rose 0.3% in February, down from a 0.4% gain in January. And compared with a year earlier, prices were up 2.5%, way down from a peak of 7.1% in mid-2022.
“There are,’’ the Bank of England warns, “more consequences from falling prices than meets the eye.’’Deflation is a widespread and sustained drop in prices across the economy. Occasional month-to-month drops in consumer prices don’t count. The United States hasn’t seen genuine deflation since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
The reality is that the economy’s health depends on steady consumer purchases. In the United States, household spending accounts for around 70% of the entire economy. If consumers were to pull back, en masse, to await lower prices, businesses would face intense pressure to cut prices even more to try to jump-start sales.