Consumer prices around the world are pulling back so rapidly, along with the collapse of oil prices, that official measures of inflation have yet to capture the magnitude of the decline. But the Billion Prices Project , which scrapes the Internet daily to capture changing prices online, is recording a significant and broadening plunge in consumer prices. The Labor Department ‘s official measure of consumer prices has declined from 2.1% this summer to 1.7% in October. But the data from the Billion Prices Project measure, which is now known as the State Street PriceStats inflation series, which provided data through Dec. 12, shows the annual change in inflation now running at 1%. The PriceStats index was running a little hotter than the CPI this summer–reaching about 2.5% in June and July–and has now declined by 1.5 percentage point, compared with the 0.4 percentage point drop in the […]