A long term inflation picture

The charts are fairly self explanatory, and simply show the actual prices plus show two additional lines; one for the price corrected by CPI and the other corrected by CPI + lies.

Thanks to John Williams of Shadow Stats for his excellent work on the CPI lies, but also note that we are not using his full adjustments (as of 1/2007, his "CPI" level was around 500 where ours was around 340... and the pre Clinton methodology CPI was about 275... and the actual BLS CPI-U was 202). This page updated on an irregular basis, approximately monthly.

As of August 2007, we changed the basis to the year 2000 on all charts to avoid issues of clarity due to having had two scales.

Per the CPI (alone and without 'lies' factored in), inflation has averaged 4.5% per year since 1963 and 4.7% since 1970 as of 2006 - for reference. That's a total of about 600% and 500%, respectively.

See the same charts and data, but log scaled on this page.

Dow	U.S. household net worth	U.S. individual net worth	Hourly earnings	U.S. housing	Corn	Wheat	Gold	Silver	CRB commodity index	Copper	Oil
Retail sales	Non durable goods	US gov't receipts	US gov't spending	PCE	CRB livestock	CRB foodstuff	Sugar	Dow, total return	Cattle

Dow stock index

Almost 90% of the Dow's gain since 1963 is inflation.

Same, but going back to 1900

Over 80% of the Dow's gain since 1900 is inflation.

Click here for a similar picture since 1963 for the S&P 500

Dow stock index, total return including dividends

The average compounded total return per year through 2007 is about 6.5%. When corrected by CPI, it's about 3.4%... and with full with CPI+lies corrections included, its about 2.8%. In other words, almost 60% of the total return is inflation only... and that's before fees, commissions and taxes.