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If you feel like you’re still paying more for less at, well, every place you patronize, you probably aren't alone.
“The main problem is that since January 2020, everything you and I buy on average is up 25%,” Apollo Global Management chief economist Torsten Sløk told Yahoo Finance Executive Editor Brian Sozzi on the Opening Bid podcast (see video above; listen in below).
Sløk’s longstanding career has involved looking into the overall mindset of investors and consumers. These days, there are multiple sets of eyes scrutinizing the cost of everything, including groceries. The overall takeaway is that prices seem to still be increasing.
On Wednesday, the January Consumer Price Index (CPI) results revealed that inflation was up 3% year over year, and 0.5% compared to December. These numbers ushered in the largest spike in CPI results month over month since August 2023. Core prices for items such as insurance, medical care, and vehicles rose by 3.3% compared to last year.
Eggs, which continue to be the most widely watched food item in the report, rose by 15.2% compared to December. It marked the biggest monthly increase for eggs since June 2015.
Read more: From $5 eggs to insurance premiums, here's where prices are rising
Going deeper, eggs rose by 53% year over year, and some forecasters have begun to claim the cost is the highest it’s been in 45 years. A key culprit for the spike in egg costs is the debilitating bird flu epidemic, which has wiped out a sizable number of animals within the poultry and egg industries.
At the beginning of last year, consumers could expect to pay on average $2.52 for a dozen eggs. Some New York City bodegas are even applying their “loosies” playbook (the practice of selling a customer a single cigarette rather than a pack), selling customers individual eggs.
Sløk notes that while inflation can slow (it is currently around 3%, down from 9% growth), “you basically never see the price level go down. It is expensive at the moment, but on average, it is almost never the case that we see the price level in aggregate come down.”
“We should not want that because, in that case, if we have a deep recession and we have a period like in the 1930s or other periods where we had deflation,” he said, “the unemployment rate at that time was 20%. So I'd rather have my job and then see things a little bit more expensive.”
He added, “It feels expensive because housing is expensive. Tuition is expensive. Healthcare is expensive. Those are some of the components that have seen the biggest increases over the last five years.”