Economics 101 - Consumer Price Index

This video is a crash course on the consumer price index (CPI) with Newsweek's Daniel Gross.  The consumer price index can be defined as a measurement of the changes in the prices of goods and services over a period of time.  The BLS, or bureau of labor statistics, places a weighting on each item within the CPI based on the relative popularity of each good or service. 

The speaker suggest that too much importance should not be placed on a single reading as a few of the items within this index can be extremely volatile, such as oil prices and food.  Instead, one should be paying attention to the trend over time.