The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly inflation report a couple of weeks ago. The headline statistic is that prices increased by 4.2 percent from April of last year and 0.8 percent from the prior month. Taken alone, these headline numbers might cause alarm for some, but once you dig into the report, you find that these increases are not primarily driven by general price rises across the economy but instead by price rises for three specific items: hotels, airline fares, and used cars.

When analyzing inflation trends, it’s common to start by focusing down on core inflation, which refers to all of the items in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) except for energy and food. The items in the core inflation basket make up 79 percent of the entire inflation basket and the core inflation rate rose by the same amount as the overall inflation rate: 0.8 percent between March and April.

A glance at the detailed expenditure categories included in the core inflation basket reveals that hotels, airfares, and used cars drove the supermajority of inflation over the last month. These items make up just 5.2 percent of the core inflation basket but accounted for 65 percent of core inflation.