Graph of the Day

Took a few days off blogging for Christmas and Boxing Day, but am now back at it! Here is a quick plot of historical measures of inflation in the U.S..  I used Pandas to grab the three price indices, and then used a nice built-in Pandas method pct_change(periods)to convert the monthly price indices (i.e., CPIAUCNS and CPIAUCSL) and the quarterly GDP deflator to measures of percentage change in prices from a year ago (which is a standard measure of inflation).  

After combining the three series into a single DataFrame object, you can plot all three series with a single line of code!

Unsurprisingly the three measures track one another very closely.  Perhaps I should have thrown in some measures of producer prices? Code is available here.