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Daily Inflation Calculator – Since 1913!
On this page is a daily inflation calculator for the United States. It uses Consumer Price Index data from the BLS from 1913 until the present day, and interpolates or extrapolates to give daily estimates. You can enter a starting amount and we’ll estimate how much it would take on the ending date to match the same purchasing power.
A low but stable level of inflation is roughly the ideal path to chart for the success of an economy. Inflation is a ‘call to action’ – a catalyst, if you will, in order to get people to mobilize their money productively. In a deflationary period, the value of currency increases – and things start to work in reverse. If value is moving in reverse, why buy non-necessities? They will cost less in real money tomorrow. If banks react by paying negative interest rates, why bother investing? You can ‘make money’ by hiding your cash in the backyard.
Truth is, economic policy as we know it works with a policy of steadily increasing inflation, but not so much in a deflationary spiral. Witness the Great Depression – many Economists have argued that the deflationary spiral created by the money supply’s contraction worsened the whole episode (and can be seen in the graph above as the sudden spike in the 1920s). Even noted libertarian Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman notes the inflexibility in the gold standard (and the inability of the Fed to ease) made the Great Depression worse.
The daily inflation calculator automatically polls the St. Louis Fed’s FRED database (at midnight, EST) and downloads CPI-U, non inflation adjusted monthly. It saves it as XML on the DQYDJ servers.
Why the effort? Well, other than being the first on the internet with this style daily inflation calculator, I do intend on building it into other tools in the future – including some calculators where you can figure out daily inflation adjusted returns for various assets classes. I’m not sure that sort of information exists anywhere. I intend to bring it to you.
And yes, I fully expect most people will use this calculator to find out the change in value of a money between today and a birth date (either a reader’s or a closer relative’s?). Have fun with it! I’ll be happy if you figure out something interesting based on the work I’ve done.
I hope you enjoyed the daily inflation calculator!
Request for graph scaled logarithmically?
A thing of beauty. Thanks for obliging!
Yes, it is beautiful, isn’t it?
This is a really cool tool, PK. Hope people make use of it. I really like that it can go forward and backward. Bookmarked this!
Well, you know the real reason, right? I couldn’t find daily CPI to go with gold and silver returns (the data I can get is daily). When something doesn’t exist, you might as well invent it, right?
Quite depressing to see how far the dollar has declined in value. Great tool, thanks for developing and sharing!
Thanks for using, haha. I always worry that my wife (testing) and I will be the only ones that try it!
Good news everyone: a dollar today is finally worth less than half its value on my date of birth. Wait, that’s not the good part. I have a solution. If money is worth less, all we need to do to solve the problem is PRINT MORE MONEY. Can I get a job at the Fed yet?
We should put April 1st Joe in there. I bet you’d be way more free with the copy/print buttons.
You inspired me. I checked prices of stuff like food, clothing & housing in 1913.Clothing and food has increased in price commensurate with what we’d expect with inflation, (mostly). Housing, OTOH, is way outta line with expectations. (Link to links: http://bit.ly/185LCsq) I’d be interested to hear your perspective on why it is so out of line with inflationary expectations.
I’d say your sample size is too small. Some places and items are going to inflate more than others – New Jersey included. I’m sure you can rent a house for $358 a month in Detroit – but you might be better off just buying it instead.
As for housing, I had a piece on affordability some time back. Check it out.
I love it – a sarcasm-fueled index. I think we’d be better off if we had more of those. As a trader, I have seriously considered putting the time in to create something mind-boggingly stupid, like a phases-of-the-moon / ES correlation index or a Baseball Standings / ES correlation index. I believe you can use just about anything to trade with as long as you use good money management, and such an index might even “prove” it.
It appears that you use a 4 month lag in your daily cpi interpolation. Is that correct?
It appears that you use a 4 month lag in your daily cpi interpolation. Is my assumption correct?
It appears so because CPI is usually on a lag (we’re attempting to grab a new release every week or so), but what you’re actually seeing is us projecting forward the daily CPI of the last month we have data for – in your case, probably January. Feel free to take a look at the code – you can right click inside the iframe and open it, then view the source.