Five Commodities Perfectly Predict Inflation

Abstract

In 2014 the renowned Arundhati Roy (2014) described capitalism as a zombie economy. Eight years later economists and stock market traders railed about the American Federal Reserve’s delay in raising interest rates to stave off “the worst inflation in 100 years”. The present article confronts these assertions by suggesting that inflation, may be an endemic and uncontrollable phenomenon, wreaking havoc upon a nation due to exogenous causes. This hypothesis is supported by our demonstration that inflation from the period 1991-2017 occurred before breaking out of control in 2022 and before the Covid19 pandemic and Ukraine war. We pursue this hypothesis by quadratically regressing the American Consumer Price Index on the prices of three foods, shelter, and gold, returning an R 2 = 0.999, showing that the prices of these five commodities account for all inflation. Our method and findings generalize beyond inflation and commodities to all social and data-science variates.