How Does Our NIPI Track The US CPI Headline: Sept 2022 Release

Laurent Bilke Oct. 13, 2022 1 min read

Food prices

The NIPI is diffusion index that summarises near-term inflation trends from scanning hundreds of thousands of news sources. A value of 50 is a situation when the volume of positive and negative news are balaanced. Above 50 means rising inflation trends.

It's not exactly an inflation forecast, more a turning point indicator.

The below chart shows:

  • the NIPI for headline inflation in the US
  • the official US Headline CPI Inflation release (month-on-month, seasonnally adjusted)

The NIPI is shown "as of release date", i.e. the last red dot on the chart is the September CPI number which was released on the 13th of October 2022.

The NIPI is released in real-time.

The chart illustrates how the headline NIPI has overall very tracked headline inflation releases. Not too bad for models which were estimated before COVID started and which have not been reestimated since.


Headline NIPI vs CPI, US

Note: a NIPI value of 50 is indicative of a balanced volume of positive and negative inflation news, a value above (below) 50 indicates positive (negative) inflationary pressures in the near-term.


Read more about the NIPI databases and the Inflation NewsBot.

If you are interested in our unique inflation data, you can reach out here.