In Some Places, Prices Are Dropping, New Inflation Data Show

Plus, has The Free Press turned against Israel?

Program note: tomorrow (Wednesday August 31) at about 10:30 am eastern we’re planning to be going “Live” with BY GLENN KESSLER, formerly the Washington Post Fact Checker columnist, to talk about some of the issues raised by his recent Substack post “Why I Left the Washington Post.” To tune in it’ll help to have the Substack mobile app installed. If you can’t catch it on short notice, don’t stress—I’m hoping to post a recording of it later—but it should be fun, so if you can join us, we’d love to have you. There should be an alert when it starts with info on how to join.

A “shelf-talker” sign in a Boston grocery store promotes lower prices on Cabot cheese.

While Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome “Too Late” Powell has halted interest rate cuts since President Trump’s inauguration, ostensibly because of the risk that tariffs will fuel inflation, prices in at least some places are actually going down.

Today’s government release of the Consumer Price Index included not only nationwide data, but also details on some urban areas. Here are the details on particular places where prices are dropping:

Between June 2025 and July 2025 in the Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN-WI area, prices went down 0.2 percent, the government reported. In urban Hawaii, Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH, and Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington TX, prices were down 0.3 percent from May 2025 to July 2025.

The New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA area showed 0.0 price change between June 2025 and July 2025.

Some of it may be sampling error. I do not want to cherry-pick places where inflation isn’t a problem to give a mistaken impression about nationwide trends. But it highlights a challenge for U.S. monetary policy, which is that the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee sets short-term interest rates nationwide, even though inflation or employment may vary widely from place to place.

Individuals, families, and, in some cases, firms have the chance to move from place to place as a way to arbitrage differences in prices, taxes, workforce skill levels, regulatory environments, and other factors. But if those declining price trends in those places continue for months to come, they might be interpreted as cautionary signs about the economic growth levels in those places. It’s a tricky balance between increased “affordability”—which is good—and businesses having to reduce prices because customers now can’t afford or are refusing to pay the prices that the businesses had been charging a month before.

Has The Free Press turned against Israel?: I am a paying subscriber to The Free Press, the Bari Weiss-founded publication that employs a lot of my former Forward and New York Sun colleagues. Here’s an item from the Free Press “Front Page” email from today: “An Israeli air strike killed five Al Jazeera journalists on Sunday, including one with alleged ties to Hamas. A spokesperson for the Israeli military confirmed Anas Al-Sharif was a target of the attack and accused him of collaborating with the terror group, while Al Jazeera denied the allegations.”

That seems unsatisfactory to me. Why say “alleged” ties to Hamas when the Israeli Defense Forces’ Arab-language spokesman has posted to social media a photo of the so-called “journalist” being hugged by Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, and when the IDF has also released a batch of records identifying the guy as a Hamas member. Or when there are screenshots of him describing the Hamas terrorists who committed the October 7 attack on Israel as “heroes”: “9 hours and the heroes are still roaming the country killing and capturing…God, God, how great are you.” Why not identify Al Jazeera for what it is, an arm of the royal family of Qatar that has been hosting Hamas’s overseas leaders? Why identify those killed in the strike as “journalists” rather than as a terrorist using journalistic cover to participate in the propaganda war against Israel? The accusation, anyway, isn’t that Al-Sharif “collaborated” with the terror group, it was that he was a member of the terror group. People may have different views on whether Israel targeting this guy based on the evidence that has been disclosed was prudent, but taking a he-said, she-said, Israel accused, Al Jazeera denied approach to this is the sort of thing you can readily get from legacy media outlets of the sort that Bari Weiss quit. For this we need The Free Press?

The self-congratulatory so-called media advocacy group the Committee to Protect Journalists, whose board is full of New York Times people, put out a blistering and hyperbolic statement accusing Israel of “murdering the messengers” and of “murder. Plain and simple.” There’s no criticism in the statement of Hamas for using news organizations as cover for its terrorism.

A recent New York Times promotional article did mention in passing that “Hamas has also made it difficult for journalists on the ground to operate freely, and intimidates its critics in Gaza, which has a chilling effect on people.” Where are the Committee to Protect Journalists statements denouncing that?

It’s hard to describe how pervasive this condemn-Israel point of view is. Even Emily Sundberg, who writes a largely apolitical Substack business newsletter (“Feed Me”) focused on marketing and media, included in her newsletter an item that said, in its entirety, “Israel killed four more Al Jazeera staff in Gaza over the weekend. According to the CPJ, at least 186 journalists have been killed in the current conflict, making it the deadliest period for journalists since they began recording deaths over 30 years ago.” Not even a mention by Sundberg of the fact that the person targeted was a Hamasnik.

Recent work: I was on the Fox Business “Kudlow” show today, which was fun. It was a particular thrill to be on the set not only with Larry, who has been a faithful reader and generous encourager over the years, but also with Steve Forbes, who I’ve long admired. Before going on, I got a moment or two with Treasury Secretary Bessent in the green room, which was also neat. The clip of the segment is here if you want to check it out. We talked about inflation and the Fed.

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