Silly Derek, only consumer price inflation counts as inflation. Just ignore the asset price inflation. The experts on TV told me so!
Discussion
And also ignore food and energy and remove higher quality items people stop buying because they get priced out. You know, just don't count anything that causes the calculation to rise. Easy peasy.
Product substitution is the most insidious part of the CPI calculation. People keep moving down to lower and lower quality products to survive but because they aren't spending more it doesn't count as inflation.
consumer price inflation also doesn't count housing or fuel either lol