“I pay attention to grocery prices. There is this large tray of lasagna that I used to buy that used to cost around $16. Now it’s around $21,” mentioned Kashkari in reference to the Stouffer’s product. “That’s my own little measuring stick of how inflation is going.” 

Kashkari mentioned the Fed will possible must proceed elevating rates of interest to push inflation down. The Fed lately hiked its benchmark short-term charge to 4.75%, however Kashkari mentioned he’d advocate for an eventual hike as much as 5.4%. “I’m a little bit on the higher end than some of my (Fed) colleagues,” he mentioned. 

Kashkari isn’t the one one paying attention to the upper value of the much-loved Stouffer’s product, which comes in quite a lot of sizes and kinds, and what it means when it comes to the large financial image. 

“I gauge inflation based on Stouffer’s frozen 4 meat lasagna,” one particular person tweeted final 12 months.

MarketWatch reached out to officers with Nestlé
NSRGY,
+0.41%,
the guardian firm of Stouffer’s, for remark about pricing, however didn’t obtain an instantaneous reply. 

Of course, most customers have a key merchandise or two of their grocery store basket that they observe when it comes to value adjustments, be it staples like bread and milk or a specialty product like frozen lasagna. And a lot consideration has been paid of late to egg costs, which surged late final 12 months due to the avian flu (although wholesale egg costs are now falling). 

The Economist additionally created a “Big Mac index,” analyzing the price of the favored McDonald’s sandwich internationally, as a means to take a look at currencies. That mentioned, the publication famous that “Burgernomics was never intended as a precise gauge of currency misalignment.”