Building Utah

This is Derek Miller, Speaking on Business. The Utah Foundation seeks to help decision-makers and citizens understand and address complex issues. President Shawn Teigen joins us with more about recent inflation trends. SHAWN TEIGEN: Until recently, most of us never really talked about inflation... but now it seems like we are all experts. As part of the Utah Foundation Misery Index, we’ve studied inflation and three other factors to find that Utah has consistently performed well relative to the nation. However, our Misery Index spiked in 2022 due to high inflation. But don’t want to decrease inflation too fast, even to reach the Fed’s 2% target rate. So to achieve that target for the year ending April 2023 would have meant almost 1% deflation in April alone to balance out the previous 11 months. Once May and June of last year fall from that annual inflation data calculation, the target rate might become attainable. We’ll find out more with the May and June of this year inflation data releases. Utah m