Inflation Watch

Inflation Watch turns official price data into plain English. No jargon, no spin, and no invented numbers.

WHAT IT SHOWS YOU

• Today's inflation rate, explained in a sentence anyone can read • Which categories are actually driving it, not just which rose most • Prices where you live, from 23 metro areas and every census region • Your own inflation rate, worked out from what you personally spend • Real dollar prices: eggs, gas, milk, electricity, diesel. Tap any price to see its history, back to the 1980s for most • Whether your pay is keeping up

ASK ANYTHING, PRIVATELY

• Ask a question in plain words and get an answer worked out from the figures in the app • It runs entirely on your device. Nothing you type is sent anywhere, and it works offline • Every number in an answer is checked against the app's own figures before you see it • If the app does not have the figure, it says so instead of guessing

TOOLS

• A mortgage discount points calculator that does the math properly, including the two effects almost every online calculator leaves out • A diesel slider: move fuel prices and see what has historically followed at the grocery store, and when • A compounding explorer: what happens if this rate simply continues • A dollar converter across a century of price data

HONEST FORECASTING

Fourteen statistical models forecast where inflation may go. Every one is scored against months it never saw while learning. Any model that cannot beat the naive assumption that nothing changes is excluded from the headline forecast and labeled as having lost. Often most of them lose. The app shows you the scoreboard rather than just an answer.

UNDERSTANDING IT

• How a Fed rate change actually reaches your mortgage, card and savings, including why mortgages barely follow it • Oil, shipping chokepoints, and the measured path from a barrel to a grocery bill • Whether printing money causes inflation (sometimes; the two big experiments came out opposite ways) • Eight ways people try to stay ahead of inflation, with their real drawbacks stated • Inflation under every president, from King George III and the colonies to today, each with a portrait, the policies they put in place and the world events behind each rise and fall • The 1923 German hyperinflation, and why it is nothing like 3% a year • What the ten largest economies report, with a third-party measure of how checkable each one is

ALERTS

Discovery signals