From: The Market Oracle

Until now, the discrepancy between actual inflation and the government’s Consumer Price Index (CPI) was largely an academic debate few people paid much attention to.

Now, however, with real-world consumer prices jumping right before our eyes … while the government’s distorted CPI still lingers near the 4% area, the gap between the two is about to burst onto the scene as a scandalous cover-up.

According to John Williams’ Shadow Statistics , the premier source of unadulterated U.S. economic indicators …

    • While the March year-over-year change in the official CPI was only 3.98% …
    • The true CPI, based on the same standards as those that prevailed before the Clinton administration, is now 11.58%!

This means that the gap between the official CPI and the alternate CPI is now a whopping 7.6 percentage points.

In other words, the U.S. government could now be understating the CPI by a full 7.6%!

Moreover, over the years, this gap has widened dramatically. Until January 1982, there was no gap whatsoever; and until November 1986, the gap was usually less than 1%. But then, it started widening like mad, and has been getting bigger ever since.

See entire article with charts