JoC-ECRI Industrial Price Index

Overview

This annual subscription service provides daily updates and the full history for the JoC-ECRI Industrial Price Index including four sub-indexes. Data may be easily charted online or downloaded by subscribers.

Features

The JoC-ECRI IPI is designed to yield a cyclical leading indicator of the inflation cycle: Cyclical turns in raw material price inflation, as measured by the growth rate of the JoC-ECRI IPI, anticipate cyclical turns in consumer inflation.

Superior performance is achieved by the careful selection and combination of the components of the index, which is made up of a broad basket of the industrial commodities that have the best cyclical relationships with inflation.

The foundation for the JoC-ECRI IPI is the work of Geoffrey H. Moore and his research staff, who have studied economic and inflation cycles for decades.

History

In the mid-1980s, The Journal of Commerce commissioned Geoffrey H. Moore and his research group to create a new index of industrial materials prices.

Unlike other commodity price indexes, this index was designed to be part of a system of leading indicators of the inflation cycle, a concept pioneered by Moore. The original index was created in 1986 and revised in 1994 by the same researchers to reflect changes in the economy.

On January 2, 2008, a revamped JoC-ECRI Industrial Price Index was released. The revision is part of a regular maintenance and development program to make the JoC-ECRI index accurately reflect the importance of key industrial commodities in today's economy. The revision adjusts the weights of the industrial commodities in the index to account for recent shifts in importance, while also pruning those that no longer play an important role in the U.S. economy and incorporating those whose importance is growing. It is designed to yield the best leading indicator of inflation based on commodity prices, and is meant to be used as part of an early-warning system to gauge underlying inflation pressures in the U.S. economy.

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