Despite inflation persisting at nearly twice the Federal Reserve’s maximum target rate of 2%, Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi has called upon the central bank to slash interest rates. It’s not that the Fed should arbitrarily shift its inflation target and destroy its credibility, Zandi argues, but rather that it should distort its entire measure of that inflation target to declare victory, coincidentally, right before the 2024 election.

Of course, the Fed’s measures aren’t wrong, and even if they were, Zandi’s proposed solution to strip the personal consumption expenditures price index of owner-occupied housing doesn’t give him the desired results he expects. In April, our last measure of the Fed’s preferred inflation measure of personal consumption expenditures price inflation, core services inflation excluding housing on its own still surpassed 3%. And even in May’s mercifully reduced consumer price index print, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that CPI inflation excluding housing still approached 5%.