CPI day, 14 October 2026: the frozen BLS values, the COLA arithmetic, the Polymarket price history and the tape counts

Companion to the editorial. This page carries the numbers, the file hashes, the pre-registration and the limits. Everything was pulled on 14 October 2026 between 22:12 and 22:40 UTC. Prices are YES-side prices on one prediction-market event and are not presented as forecasts; the tape counts are of words, not editorial intent.

The Social Security arithmetic and the other September percentages

Source: BLS public API v1, pulled 2026-10-14T22:12:57Z, nine CPI series for 2024 to 2026. File bls_api_2026-10-14T221257Z.json, sha256 32b254a954183ba39bac021a294a13a3aa83b35beb9ba5ea06ce7d2a709a8a34. The API returned status REQUEST_SUCCEEDED and no value for October 2025 on any series. The Social Security Administration’s own division is on its COLA page.

Why five percentages sound alike: core (2.6) is the CPI-U without food and energy, 12 months; headline (3.7) is CPI-U, September against September; the raise (3.6) is the CPI-W averaged over July, August and September against the same quarter a year earlier; the wage-earner index’s own September figure is 3.9; and the CPI-U averaged over the same quarter is 3.50. These are different sentences, not competing estimates of one.

Polymarket: contract definition and price history

Event: “Fed Decision in October?” (slug fed-decision-in-october-20260617190323537). Pulled read-only from the public gamma-api and the CLOB prices-history endpoint on 2026-10-14, event file at 22:14:03Z (sha256 43b64f67a6f0bdd442c40c63e75e5519c2b9eee21672ddd55e7f8541135dca71) and one-minute YES-price history from 10:00Z to 22:14Z (file pm_history_2026-10-14T221403Z.json, sha256 9e7d40875ca003629c7202e7697f9a5e1f5f264c0b0a3897297e6c8793f203d1). Samples are stamped about 20 seconds past each minute; each value below is the last sample stamped within the named minute or earlier. The BLS embargo lifted at 8:30 a.m. Eastern, which is 12:30Z. The 54.0 peak of the 25-basis-point increase contract was at 13:08Z. A YES price is the price of a contract that pays 1 if the stated outcome occurs; it is not a forecast and is not presented as one.

Event rules as returned by the API:

The FED interest rates are defined in this market by the upper bound of the target federal funds range. The decisions on the target federal funds range are made by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meetings.

This market will resolve to the amount of basis points the upper bound of the target federal funds rate is changed by versus the level it was prior to the Federal Reserve's October 2026 meeting.

If the target federal funds rate is changed to a level not expressed in the displayed options, the change will be rounded up to the nearest 25 and will resolve to the relevant bracket. (e.g. if there's a cut/increase of 12.5 bps it will be considered to be 25 bps)

The resolution source for this market is the FOMC’s statement after its meeting scheduled for October 27-28, 2026 according to the official calendar: https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/fomccalendars.htm.

The level and change of the target federal funds rate is also published at the official website of the Federal Reserve at https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/openmarket.htm.

This market may resolve as soon as the FOMC’s statement for their October meeting with relevant data is issued. If no statement is released by the end date of the next scheduled meeting, this market will resolve to the "No change" bracket.

Tape counts: CNN and Fox News, the two CPI release days

Source: the Media Observatory (observatory.db, opened read-only). Unit: uses per 10,000 words with every word in the denominator; primary condition is program-labelled blocks only; the raw-tape column counts every block, ad copy included. Consecutive identical utterances were collapsed. Permutation p is a label swap within paired hours, 10,000 swaps, seed 20261014, two-sided and uncorrected; Holm p corrects across the 12 words and phrases counted. With only 14 or 15 paired hours the number of distinct swaps is limited; read the p values as rough. The tape is a receipt: no transcript line is quoted anywhere.

Wednesday 14 October 2026 (September CPI, released 12:30Z)

15 paired clock hours (UTC hours 00 through 21 with at least 1,000 program-block words on both channels). Program words: CNN 99,618, Fox News 100,312. Raw tape words: CNN 152,979, Fox News 153,947.

Friday 11 September 2026 (August CPI, released 12:30Z)

14 paired clock hours (UTC hours 00 through 21 with at least 1,000 program-block words on both channels). Program words: CNN 89,764, Fox News 94,538. Raw tape words: CNN 142,738, Fox News 138,266.

The other 33 days in the tape (2026-09-10 through 2026-10-13, at least six paired hours, program blocks)

Pre-registration

Written and hashed before any permutation test and before the count of any word except inflation, prices, gasoline and consumer price, which a scouting pass earlier the same evening had already counted once. The text below is the file as hashed (sha256 a6c263263f5ad2c737d74ef20631c97b0ed0509c87adf6e2814a24ef9a645147). Departure from it: it lists eleven items; consumer price and consumer prices were counted as two phrases, so Holm was applied across twelve.

# Pre-registration, CPI-day tape count, written 2026-10-14 22:15Z AFTER the same-day scouting sweep had already looked at raw counts of inflation, prices, gasoline and consumer price (token counts, Oct 14 and Sep 11) and BEFORE any count of the other words or any permutation test
Question: on the two CPI release days in the tape (Fri 2026-09-11, Wed 2026-10-14), how often did CNN and Fox News (SiriusXM audio, Observatory) say words about prices?
Unit: count per 10,000 words (all tokens in denominator); program-labelled blocks only (primary); raw tape (all blocks) as a stated sensitivity.
Window: UTC clock hours 00 through 21 of each day (the Oct 14 tape ends 21:53Z); an hour counts only if both channels have >=1000 program words in it.
Words/phrases fixed in advance (single tokens unless a phrase): inflation | prices | price | gas | gasoline | "cost of living" (also matches cost-of-living) | "consumer price" (matches consumer price, consumer prices) | "social security" | cpi.
Controls: iran, trump (to see whether the channels simply differ in volume).
Baseline: the same words on every other UTC day 2026-09-10..2026-10-13, same hours 00-21 rule, per channel: median and range.
Test: label-swap permutation within paired hours, 10,000 swaps, seed 20261014; two-sided; uncorrected p reported, nine words + 2 controls = 11 comparisons per day (Holm applied).
Not tested: why. Words are not editorial intent. No quotation from the tape anywhere.

Primary documents

• BLS, Consumer Price Index Summary, September 2026
• SSA press release, 14 October 2026
• SSA Office of the Chief Actuary, Latest COLA
• NPR, Scott Horsley, 14 October 2026
• Polymarket, Fed Decision in October?
• The desk, Boomers poll audit part two
• The desk, CNN and Fox word gap, 5 to 12 October
• The desk, September 12 CPI brief

What the desk could not verify or reach

• No futures curve or CME FedWatch value was pulled; NPR’s “50-50” sentence names no instrument.
• BLS tables 1 through 7 and the full release were not read; the summary page was fetched through a text conversion and selected passages kept.
• No newsroom’s coverage was checked beyond NPR; the search index available this week lags by days.
• 14 October chyrons: the table ends at 2026-10-13 23:59Z.
• Why the hike contract faded after its peak: not established.
• Only two CPI release days exist in the tape (it begins 2026-09-10); that is not a pattern.
• The block labels on the tape were assigned by a model and were not audited word by word.