BTC US Inflation (CPI, year over year): 3.35
How much more American consumers pay this month than they paid in the same month a year ago. We compute the year-over-year change ourselves from the published index.
The Consumer Price Index measures the cost of a fixed basket of goods and services for American city households. This chart shows how much that cost has changed against the same month one year earlier — the number people mean when they say 'inflation is 2.5%'.
High and **rising** inflation pushes central banks to raise interest rates, which drains money from risky assets; **falling** inflation gives them room to cut, which usually does the opposite. Bitcoin's reaction has not been consistent — it fell hard through the 2022 inflation spike despite the 'inflation hedge' story — so read this as the input that sets interest-rate policy, not as a direct bitcoin driver.
In words: take the published index for a month, divide by the index for the same month a year earlier, subtract one, and express as a percent. The publisher gives us the index; the year-over-year calculation is ours, which is why the first twelve months of the index carry no reading at all.
MONTHLY. One point per month, **never** more — this is not a daily series and is not drawn as one. It is also LATE: a month's figure is released in the middle of the following month, so the newest point on this chart is always a few weeks old. The index runs from January 1947, so the year-over-year line starts January 1948. The series is seasonally adjusted by the publisher; it is the all-items index, not 'core', so food and energy are included.
ALERT THRESHOLD. The inflation alert reports a month-to-month step in this year-over-year rate beyond −0.9223 or +0.8432 percentage points — the MEASURED 2.5th and 97.5th percentiles of all 940 monthly steps (1948-02-01 → 2026-06-01). On that history the bands changed 71 times — 18 into a big drop, 18 into a big jump, 35 back to ordinary — about 0.91 a year, and the same edges give 0.92 a year over 1985–2026, so they are not an artefact of the post-war decades. The alert compares this number **only** against its own history: we hold no forecasts, so no 'surprise versus consensus' is ever claimed.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: All Items in U.S. City Average, via FRED series CPIAUCSL. Public domain.
Computed by us from FRED CPIAUCSL (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, all urban consumers, seasonally adjusted) · monthly