Minimal Misery

With the unemployment rate at 5.5% and the CPI at -0.1%, the Misery Index, the sum of the two numbers, is just 5.4%, its lowest level since April 1959, and slightly less than a quarter of its all-time high of 21.9% set in May 1980. Since the start of the Great Recession, the MI reached as high as 12.8% in September 2011, when inflation was 3.8% and unemployment was 9%.