United States Purchasing Power Since 2019 (100 = January 2019)

## What this measures

How much 100 units of United States's own currency held since January 2019 buy each month, after consumer price inflation: 100 × CPI in January 2019 ÷ CPI in the month. It is 100 in January 2019 and falls as prices rise. This is a Palanor calculation from OECD consumer price data (macro.oecd.cpi.usa).

## Why it matters

It turns years of inflation into one plain figure: what the same money buys today compared with before the pandemic and the price surge of 2021 to 2023. It is the household view of inflation, cumulated.

## How to read it

Lower means more purchasing power lost. A reading of 80 means 100 from January 2019 now buys what 80 bought then: prices have risen by a quarter (100 ÷ 80). Compare countries on the same month: each is measured in its own currency against its own prices.

## What it does not say

It uses local-currency prices only. It is about each country's own inflation, not exchange rates: it does not say what a U.S. dollar buys abroad, and it does not convert between currencies. It ignores interest earned and wage growth; money in a savings account or a raise may have kept pace. It inherits the limits of the price index, an average basket.

## Source

Palanor calculation from OECD consumer price indices: 100 × CPI(January 2019) ÷ CPI(month), monthly from January 2019. OECD, Consumer price indices (CPIs, HICPs): the COICOP 2018 dataflow (`OECD.SDD.TPS,DSD_PRICES_COICOP2018@DF_PRICES_C2018_ALL`) or, for countries the OECD has not yet moved to it, the COICOP 1999 dataflow (`OECD.SDD.TPS,DSD_PRICES@DF_PRICES_ALL`); key USA.M.N.CPI.IX._T.N._Z (monthly, national CPI, index, all items, not seasonally adjusted). Data Explorer: https://data-explorer.oecd.org. Palanor reads it every day and keeps one dataflow for the whole series. Source: OECD. Licence: CC BY 4.0; the OECD terms say "Except where additional restrictions apply as stated above, you can extract from, download, copy, adapt, print, distribute, share and embed Data for any purpose, even for commercial use."