About the Berninger Reports

The Berninger Reports are quarterly economic reports and provide additional information on inflation and deflation trends for selected countries. Currently these reports are available in PDF format for:

  • Australia
  • Iceland
  • Euro-Zone
  • USA

If you would like to receive the Berninger reports, please send us your inquiry using the contact form.

The Berninger reports provide a comprehensive overview of actual economic trends as a function of monetary and fiscal policies as well as consumer behavior. Within each report, Dr. Berninger provides a short summary analysis of opportunities and risks.

Disclaimer: Key Contact SL and Dr. Berninger are not licensed as financial advisors. The reports are for academic purposes, only. None of the information provided should not be considered as investment advice.

Euro Zone Price level Data

Eurozone Inflation, Deflation and Inflation price levels, HCPI
Eurozone Price Levels (measured by Berninger.de method) in comparison to official CPI

Price levels are usually captured by measuring an ever changing basked of goods. Much of the critizism regarding this method is on its indirect approach of measuring Inflation by measuring changes in a basked of items, which are subject to change, itself. This indirect method also offers a greater number of variables coming into the game and distort the results. Despite that, it is prone to fraud.

A direct measurement is provided with the method utilized by Dr. Berninger. His approach analyses Deflationary effects as well as inflationary effects. The combined data give an improved picture of "felt" inflation. He therefore considers this method to be superior for investment decisions.

The Dr. Berninger CPI can explain some issues, which the existing HCPI methods fail to explain: 

  • Why people felt that with the Euro introduction price levels increased
  • His method can quantify this effect and it allows to drill down to the changes which caused this effect
  • The method gives a better trend forecasting tool for future Deflation and Inflation trends
  • It captures even short term effects, as we have seen in 2007, where consumers felt that prices jumped due to high oil prices and then prices declined again in H2 2008

Price Level of Iceland as Function of Deflation and Inflation

Iceland, Prices as Function of Deflation and Inflation, Comparison with conventional HCPI

One of the main issues in understanding governmental actions and options to deal with crisis is to gain an understanding of the main drivers of price levels. Usually prices are measured and reported as CPI. More detailed information in the CPI is found in seperation of groups. 

However CPI fails to explain several issues.

CPI as a tool fails largely to explain supply destruction. It also failes to explain when efficiency gains cause prices to increase. Both effects could be caused by Deflation (negative Deflation causes prices to increase) We should keep in mind that usually price increases are attributed to Inflation. That "misunderstanding" is causing heated discussions between monetarists and Deflationists.

Negative Inflation could be another phenomenon to deal with. Understanding if the economy suffers amaging effects from consumer spending or if the price levels fall due to oher effects, such as deleveraging in the financial products,  could be potentially important for making good decisions.

CPI usually fails to exlpain these effects.

The following method seperates the deflationary and inflationary price driver trends and allows to analyze what caused them and even more important what are the remaining options for central banks and governments to counter undesired economic trends.

Comparison with the conventional CPI is provided