Inflation in America soars to 8%. Or is it more like 6%?

“preferred measure of inflation” is a phrase that often crops up in reporting on the American economy. It stands in for a verbose official name: the personal-consumption-expenditures price index (). Most discussion of inflation, however, focuses on its better-known and pithier relative, the consumer-price index ().That usually does not matter much. But the gap between and has recently widened, hitting 2.3 percentage points in May, the largest divergence since 1981. So while headlines blare out that inflation is running at more than 8% annually, it is just over 6% in the world. To be sure, the lower figure is not cause for celebration. Just like , it is also at a four-decade high. But it is nonetheless instructive to consider why the gap has grown so wide.