It is still possible to rise. We are waiting for the October CPI data, as well as the October wages for accommodation and catering services, but using nowcasting and inference, we can show the actual wages in October.
figure 1: The average hourly income of production and non-supervised workers in the accommodation and food service industries, in USD/hour, according to CPI (black), chain CPI, seasonal adjustment (blue-green), personal consumption expenditure deflator (red ), CPI wage earners and clerks (sky blue) and consumer price coordination index, seasonally adjusted (pink), to 2020. The decline date defined by NBER is shaded in gray. Chained CPI and HICP seasonally adjusted by X-12/X-11 ARIMA. Using the logarithmic first-order difference specification, the October wage observations are inferred from the average wages for leisure and hotel services in 2021. Source: BLS, BEA, EU, NBER and the author’s calculations.
