Every yield on this site gets the same question: what's the real number? Inflation deserves it too, because inflation is a yield — the negative one, applied to every dollar you hold. Here is the audited bill for the United States since January 2020, and then the world version, where the same experiment ran with the safety off.
The US bill: prices up 30.4%, and your $100 is $76.70
The Consumer Price Index stood at 258.49 in January 2020. In September 2026 it printed 337.07. That is a 30.4% increase in the official cost of living in six years and nine months. Flip it around, the way it actually feels: $100 of January 2020 money buys $76.70 worth of goods today. Nobody sent you that statement. It arrived anyway, one receipt at a time.
US CPI inflation, year over year. BLS data via FRED (series CPIAUCSL), checked October 29, 2026.
The path matters. Inflation was declared "transitory" in 2021 while it climbed; the word was retired that November. It peaked at 9.1% in June 2022 — the highest in four decades — then ground down to the high 2s, where it sat, stubbornly, through 2024 and 2025. And lately it has been creeping the wrong way again: 3.7% in September 2026, with a war-driven energy shock running through the economy. The fire is smaller. It is not out, and the building is still more expensive than it was.
Where it actually hit: the average is a lie of composition
Nobody buys "the CPI basket." You buy your basket, and the big lines in a renter's or a young family's basket ran far hotter than the headline:
- Rent (market): asking rents for single-family homes are up 47% since January 2020, per Zillow's Observed Rent Index; apartments are up about 30%. Miami is up 65%.
- Shelter (official): the CPI's own shelter index is up 35.4% — and it lags the market, because it blends in everyone's existing leases and a modeled "owners' equivalent rent" instead of what a new lease actually costs.
- Food: the CPI food index is up 33.5%.
- Home prices: the Case-Shiller national index is up 52.9% — great if you owned one in 2020, a wall if you didn't.
That gap — headline 30.4%, your actual life 35–50% — is why "inflation is back to 3%" lands so badly at kitchen tables. The official number is an average of everybody's basket, including the paid-off-mortgage household whose biggest cost never moved. If your two biggest costs are rent and groceries, your personal inflation rate beat the headline by half again.
Did pay keep up? For the average worker: almost exactly not
To stand still against a 30.4% price rise, a January 2020 salary needed to grow about 30.6%: $50,000 then needs roughly $65,300 now just to buy the same life. What did the average worker actually get? Average hourly earnings across the private sector rose about 22% cumulatively over 2020–2026 on an annual-average basis, against about 23% cumulative inflation on the same basis — which prices the average real wage at roughly flat, a hair under where it started, after six years of raises. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' own real-earnings series says the same thing more bluntly: from February 2020 to December 2025, the average private worker's inflation-adjusted hourly pay rose by 34 cents, measured in 2020 dollars.
And the most recent print is worse: real average hourly earnings fell 0.7% year over year in September 2026. Paychecks are growing; prices are growing faster again. The dividing line of the whole era is simple arithmetic: if your pay rose more than about 31% since 2020, you beat inflation. If it didn't — and for the average worker it didn't — you took a pay cut that never appeared on any pay stub.
Where it came from: follow the money supply
Supply chains, energy shocks, and reopening demand all played their parts. But the money trail is the part that fits on one line: the M2 money supply went from $15.45 trillion in February 2020 to $21.71 trillion in April 2022 — up 40.5% in 26 months — as the Federal Reserve bought trillions in bonds and the Treasury mailed out stimulus. It has never come back down; M2 sits near $23.5 trillion today. More dollars, chasing roughly the same pile of houses, cars, and eggs. Prices are where that math settles. It doesn't explain every month of the spike, but no honest account of a 30% price level jump skips a 40% jump in the money stock that preceded it.
The world version: same disease, bigger doses
The United States had the rich world's standard case. Global inflation averaged a peak of about 8.8% in 2022 (IMF) — the worst worldwide burst since the 1970s–80s. The peaks, country by country:
Peak year-over-year inflation during the surge. National statistics offices via IMF reporting; Argentina's peak is April 2024.
- Euro area 10.6%, United Kingdom 11.1% (both October 2022) — energy-import economies hit by the same shock with weaker currencies. Both are back near 2–3% now.
- Turkey, 85.5% (October 2022) — what happens when a government orders its central bank to cut rates into rising inflation. Officially still ~32% in mid-2026; independent economists at ENAG estimate the real figure closer to 54%. Yes — even the inflation statistic can be bogus. Check who publishes it.
- Argentina, 211% in 2023, peaking near 289% year over year in April 2024 — decades of deficits financed at the printing press, compounding. Under the Milei austerity program it has since fallen to roughly 34% — still a number that would be a national emergency anywhere else.
- The crisis tier: Sri Lanka ~70% (2022), Ghana ~54%, Pakistan ~38%, Nigeria 33.7% (April 2024) — food-and-fuel importers with debts in dollars and revenues in local currency. And Venezuela, where hyperinflation ran into the thousands of percent and the honest answer is that the statistics themselves gave out.
Notice the pattern across all of it: the worst outcomes are never really about grocery stores. They're about governments spending money they don't have and a central bank expected to print the difference. The US version was milder because the dollar is the world's reserve currency — the bill got shared with everyone holding dollars abroad. Shared, not avoided.
The BogusAPY read: inflation is the house yield
Every saver in America was enrolled in this whether they signed up or not. The FDIC's national average savings rate is 0.38%. Against a 30.4% price rise, money parked at the average bank earned a real yield of roughly minus twenty-something percent over the period — the worst-performing "safe" asset of the era, and the only one marketed as risk-free. Meanwhile the quiet winners were the ones holding fixed-rate debt: a 3% mortgage from 2020 is being repaid in dollars worth 23% less, which makes the borrower's real interest rate deeply negative. Inflation always pays somebody. The entire game is figuring out whether it's paying you.
Check it yourself: links and sources
- US CPI levels, shelter, food, M2, and home prices: BLS and Federal Reserve data via FRED — series CPIAUCSL, CUSR0000SAH1, CPIUFDNS, M2SL, CSUSHPISA (checked October 29, 2026).
- Market rents: Zillow Observed Rent Index (ZORI), January 2020 vs September 2026, as compiled by Wolf Street, October 19, 2026.
- Wages: BLS average hourly earnings (CES0500000003) and the BLS Real Earnings releases; cumulative nominal-vs-CPI comparison on an annual-average basis.
- World peaks and the global average: IMF World Economic Outlook data; INDEC (Argentina); TurkStat with ENAG independent estimates (Turkey); Eurostat; UK ONS.
- Savings rates: FDIC national average deposit rates, October 2026.
Not financial advice.
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