Government Spending and Inflation. Part 14A – Deflation

We have failed to find systematic relationships between consumer inflation and federal deficit spending over long time periods. This is a continuation of looking at each period of significant inflation and disinflation/deflation individually.  Parts 13A1 and 13B2 analyzed the ten significant inflation periods since 1914.  This is the first of two posts to analyze the eleven significant deflationary periods for the years 1914-2022.


From photo by Guillaume de Germain on Unsplash

Government Spending and Inflation. Part 12

Note: There are a number of errors in the analysis.  A new article will be posted with the correct analysis.  This post will remain.  The reason is that this series of blog articles constitutes my “research notebook.”  As anyone trained in science or engineering will tell you, a research notebook is a chronological record of work.  When errors are made, they are noted but not crossed out or removed.  Removing any part invalidates the research record.  So Part 13 of this series will be a replacement for Part 12.

In previous posts in this series, we have looked at what can be learned by looking at the time series data for U.S. federal government spending and consumer inflation (CPI).  We have failed to find systemic consistency in the correlation between these two data sets.  In the most recent effort,1 we isolated those data points belonging to periods of significant inflation and significant disinflation/deflation.  Even that partitioning of the data did not yield the systemic patterns sought.  This brings us to see what can be learned by studying each period of significant inflation changes individually.


From a photo by Jan Antonin Kolar on Unsplash

Government Spending and Inflation. Part 9

Last week we thought we had wrapped up, for now, our work on timeline shift effects on the correlation between US federal government deficit spending and consumer inflation.  However, more ideas have occurred, and this week we will look at further details regarding which comes first, inflation or increased government spending.


Credit:  Photo by Grace O’Driscoll on Unsplash

Government Spending and Inflation. Part 4

In previous posts on this topic,1,2,3 we have looked at the historical records of inflation and deficit spending by the U.S. federal government.  The changing dates for the government’s fiscal year over the country’s history confounded the correlation analysis of that data.  Since 1913, U.S. inflation data has been recorded monthly.  In this post, we will use the data since 1913 to align the timelines of the two variables.


Credit: Foto-RaBe4 from Pixabay

Government Spending and Inflation. Part 2

This post will address how data sampling affects the analysis results for correlations between U.S. deficit spending and inflation.  In Part 11of this series, it was seen that there is significant variability in this correlation over time. It is essential to know whether that variability is affected by changing the data sampling structure.  If changes are connected to data treatment, care must be taken to ensure conclusions are fundamental to the overall data and not an artifact of how it is organized.


Image credit: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay2