A new year and we are straight back into talk of inflation. But while the November inflation figures released on Wednesday were lower than expected, it is unlikely to do much to affect the outlook for interest rates.

One of the impacts of having more of something is that each individual piece is less valuable, and so it is with inflation stats. Last year the Bureau of Statistics moved from putting out the official consumer price index figures every quarter to every month. And while that does provide us with more information, it means that each release is given less importance than used to be the case when we had to wait three months for each one.

In November, annual inflation was 3.4%, down from 3.8% in October. This was lower than expected but not by enough to really affect the likelihood of what the RBA will do in the first week of February.

The good news is that the October figures do seem to be a bit of an outlier, with both the CPI and the trimmed mean (which strips out the biggest rises and falls to get an “underlying” figure”) falling in November:

But these new monthly figures are rather erratic. In........

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