Good joke about “core” inflation

The issue of the so-called core inflation rate has been dealt with repeatedly on this site, by me, by Murray Rothbard and others. Here is one funny way of looking at it , uttered by Bill Davisson managing director of Hartford Investment Management, when commenting on the view that while oil prices are rising sharply, there’s no need to worry because the average economist forecast is that next weeks core PPI and CPI numbers will show only slow increases: “There’s a joke in the fixed income world that the PPI and CPI excluding everything is zero.”