Given that the Federal Reserve is now the nation’s largest creditor, through expansions of the money supply, one should hardly be surprised that prices are rising. Although the inflation tax has not reared its ugly head so much in the last couple of years, more reports are coming in that the devaluation of the currency has arrived.

The American Institute for Economic Research (where I worked in 2009) has shown a particular interest in this development, and they’re publishing a new measure, one which they call the Everyday Price Index. This only measures frequent purchases—once per month or more—which accounts for almost half of all spending but excludes big ticket items such as household appliances, automobiles, and houses.

AIER has chosen these items because individuals have less ability to avoid or put them off. Additionally, one cannot plan well for them, and therefore price changes will have a greater impact on people’s wallets. These particular price changes also explain, to a large degree, people’s experiences and perceptions the best, since they are the prices they deal with most regularly.

For this refined measure, AIER finds an inflation rate of 8 percent between 2010 and 2011—compared with 3.1 percent for the official, published rate (the Consumer Price Index). This finding caught the attention of media outlets across the country, including the Wall Street Journal. Here is their concise overview and analysis:

And here is the AIER breakdown, showing transportation costs increasing by 21 percent in just one year:

Assuming these frequents spending components also have more rapidly adjusting prices, this disparate price change finding could suggest that the remaining components of the CPI are set to grow rapidly as well. One of the authors of the AIER report, Polina Vlasenko, spoke with me. She has yet to run an analysis of the prospect of such a lag-time, but she did not rule it out.

More interesting for her, though, is that until around the year 2000, the EPI tracked the CPI very well. But since then, the two data sets have diverged. She is not sure what changed at that time, but she speculates that perhaps the EPI components of consumption are less buffered by international trade. Therefore, they have been particularly sensitive to domestic fluctuations within the United States, including monetary policy.