Going down.
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer
What is it about this economy that resists the normal ways we understand the world around us? In July, inflation froze after nearly a year and a half of relentless increases, with a sharp decrease in oil and gas prices cooling the economy. In the days following that report, the Dow Jones rose some 1,500 points and the economy seemed to be — finally — on a better footing. Today, the federal government released its inflation report for August, which showed that things hadn’t changed all that much from the previous month, with the Consumer Price Index coming in at 8.3 percent annually but rising just one-tenth of a percentage point month over month, again driven down by the price of gas. This time, however, the Dow…
