Where consumers are getting a break from inflation

Yahoo Finacne's Rick Newman examines wehre inflation isn't impacting people as much as many may think.\

Video transcript

SEANA SMITH: We just heard Brian Chung talking about what to expect from Fed Chair, Jay Powell, tomorrow, and a lot of this is going to hinge on the inflation debate and where things stand. Because certainly, in some pockets of the economy, we have seen as the prices continue to rise. So that's not the case for everywhere. Inflation certainly isn't in every part of the US economy. So we want to bring in Rick Newman, who has been digging into this just a little bit.

Rick you looked at places that weren't seeing a price bump at all. What did you find?

RICK NEWMAN: Yeah, these are actually some significant parts of people's regular budgets, so rent, nationwide, is only up 1.8% during the last 12 months, and these are all annual figures. College tuition, parents are used to seeing that go up 6% or 7% a year. That's only up 0.3% during the last year. Medical care, that's another place where people just think prices rise by a lot every year, only up 0.9% per year. And computer equipment and services like internet service, that is only up 0.1%. Call that no change whatsoever.

And I think what's going on here is the pandemic and the lockdowns and the supply chain disruptions changed a lot of things, and they're causing some prices to go way up, but some of those changes are also pushing prices for other things way down. So there's a good chance we're going to see some normalization here during the next few months, Seana, with things that are overpriced coming down and things that are underpriced probably coming up.

- Rick, real quick, perception is in some people's minds reality, so numbers don't lie, but perception sometimes does. So will people really notice that those prices haven't really gone up that much?

RICK NEWMAN: I doubt it. In fact, there's been a lot of study of gasoline prices, which have a massively outsized effect on consumer psyches. And if gas prices are going up-- and gas prices are going up right now, by the way. People think inflation is out of hand if they see gas prices rise by $0.25 a gallon, and often, that's not the case.

I mean, inflation perceptions matter because inflation can make people think that it's a bad time in the economy. Maybe they shouldn't spend money. People are aware that inflation is higher than it used to be, not clear yet if that is affecting the overall economy. We'll find out within a couple of months, I think.

SEANA SMITH: All right, Rick Newman. And of course, you can find Rick's piece on yahoofinance.com. Rick, great to see--