Gas vs Gold (what does this mean?)

[bb113]

So I made this, and not sure if it's been done before...




Around 80% of gas price can be attributed to inflation?

Sorry for the blur, it happens when tinypic resizes. What's the code to have the forum resize a pic?

[bb113]

Oh, I didn't realize excel outputs correl() as just "r". So not r²

[Etlase2]

why would you use gold instead of the CPI?

[benjamindees]

One obvious reason is that gold hasn't changed over 40 years whereas the makeup of the CPI has.

[Etlase2]

ohnoes the CPI has changed

whatever. gold is 1 commodity, it isn't some inflation-proof panacea, and you simply cannot draw the conclusion that gas and oil have any correlation besides two separate commodities on a chart

[jwzguy]

ohnoes the CPI has changed

whatever. gold is 1 commodity, it isn't some inflation-proof panacea, and you simply cannot draw the conclusion that gas and oil have any correlation besides two separate commodities on a chart

Lol? You can easily draw the conclusion they have a correlation. Run a correlation study and it will show the strength of the correlation.

[bb113]

It is a very nice correlation. The reason I made this was after reading this story:

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2012/03/22/ap-gas-prices-analysis/

They took oil extraction numbers for each month and then also gas prices and looked for a correlation without finding one. The way they did it was dumb imo because you would expect a lag between oil production and gas price would you not? So then I charted the price over time vs production over time to see if there was a lagging correlation, and there really isnt. There is a very strong correlation between gas and gold prices though.

Am I just looking at inflation? Is that all that is going on here?

[bb113]

Also, official CPI from jan 1976 to feb 2012 has been a straight line (y = .3849x + 60.55), so there is no nice correlation between that and gas price.

Really I'm just asking because I don't know if this is just stuff everyone knows already.

[benjamindees]

Everyone knows this already.  It's called black gold for a reason.

CPI is a straight line because it's purposely manipulated to be a straight line.

[bb113]

I see, so once again everything the politicians and media are talking about is mostly pointless.

[runeks]

The good question, in my opinion, is whether gas/oil priced in gold is a relatively straight line because they've both gone up in price simultaneously (relative to most other things). Gold going up because of nervous investors and gas going up because it's becoming increasingly harder to find. Or if it indeed is inflation that is responsible for both the price increase of gold and oil. The answer is probably a combination.

Has anyone tried making inflation calculations using more than prices of consumer goods? Like using a combination of consumer goods, house prices, stock prices, precious metals prices and such? Basically pooling together everything you can buy denominated in dollars and see what the average increase has been per year since ~1970.