Deflation Due to Lower Commodity Prices Is Not a Problem (Except to Commodity Producers)

For some reason economics reporters and economists seem to have a really hard time understanding deflation. There are two lessons for today. First, we get the standard lesson: crossing zero means nothing, the problem is too low a rate of inflation.

As I've written a few thousand times, inflation is an aggregate measure that combines price changes of hundreds of thousands of goods and services. When the inflation rate gets near zero it means that than many of the price changes are already nega...