Prices Are High. Here’s One Reason Not to Panic.

The government’s latest data drop puts a big exclamation point on something you already knew: Prices for much of the stuff we all buy — gasoline, clothing, fruits and vegetables — are up sharply over just the past month. To be precise, the average cost of everything we buy is up 3.3 percent from a year before, way more than last month’s 2.4 percent rise. These numbers are pretty huge, the largest one-month jump since the pandemic.