The nitty-gritty of Wednesday’s Consumer Price Index (CPI) justifies the Reserve Bank’s suspicions about the new monthly way of measuring price pressures across the economy. While “rate rise looms” may be the dominant tone of the media coverage in the wake of the inflation figure, when you dig down into the data, the crucial trimmed mean measure only shifted 0.1%, despite a surge in domestic and international travel costs (which were up nearly a quarter in December alone!). In fact, domestic and international travel costs accounted for 98% of December’s monthly rise of 1% in the headline CPI.