The federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics released new price inflation data today, and according to the report, September was yet another month of soaring inflation. According to the BLS, Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation rose 8.2 percent year over year during September, before seasonal adjustment. That’s the nineteenth month in a row of inflation above the Fed’s arbitrary 2 percent inflation target, and it’s seven months in a row of price inflation above 8 percent.

In the latest demonstration of the absurdity of defamation laws, radio show host Alex Jones has been ordered to pay $965 million to people who didn’t like things Jones said about the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Connecticut.

It is not possible to establish the conditions of the economy by just inspecting the data as a whole, according to many economists. What is required, instead, is to break the data into its key components, which supposedly will enable economists to identify the true state of the economy.

Components That Drive the Data

According to popular thinking, data that is observed over time—labelled as time series—is driven by four components, these are: