Price spikes keep happening, but it's not because of some people's favorite boogeyman.
Eggs, orange juice, and gas all have posted eye-popping jumps in prices since the pandemic — even by inflation standards of the time.
For example, prices of frozen juice surged 18.3% year over year in August, logging the 16th double-digit annual increase, according to the most recent US Consumer Price Index (CPI). Egg prices are again on a tear, jumping 57% year over year in August. And who can forget when prices at the pump neared $5 a gallon two years ago?
But what's behind these surges had nothing to do with who is in the White House. Instead, those spikes reflect isolated issues with each product's supply chain, creating jumps in prices even when inflation is cooling or stable.
The phenomenon also serves as a good reminder why both food and gas prices are stripped from the core CPI because their volatility so often distorts the inflation we're feeling.
Prices for eggs are seen at a grocery store in Chicago on Sept. 19. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh) ·(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Cracking egg prices
Let's start with eggs. Late last month, JD Vance, the GOP vice presidential candidate, was filmed in a grocery store with a carton of eggs in his hand.
"Eggs when Kamala Harris took office were short of a $1.50 a dozen," he said on the C-SPAN clip. "Now, a dozen eggs will cost you around $4 thanks to Kamala Harris's inflationary policies."
The average price for Grade A large eggs was $3.204 per dozen in August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's more than double from $1.466 per dozen when the Biden-Harris administration took office in January 2021.
Vance further blamed the Inflation Reduction Act that Harris helped pass in the Senate with the deciding vote in 2022. But the IRA is not behind the egg price spike — not the one happening today and not the one that occurred in January 2023, when egg prices hit $4.823 per dozen. It's something much simpler: bird flu.
The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) confirmed an aggressive outbreak of avian influenza in the country in February 2022. So far, 100.78 million poultry birds across 48 states have been affected by the disease, reducing the number of laying hens and eggs going to supermarkets.
The trajectory of the flu ebbs and flows.
For instance, the volume of cases surged in March of 2022 followed by smaller upticks in September and December of that year. Prices then jumped in January 2023.
The latest spikes, starting in December, have not been quite as severe, but they have still led to the higher prices we're seeing on grocery shelves now and will continue to see, according to Kevin Bergquist, a sector manager at Wells Fargo Agri-Food Institute.
"As eggs-pected, the USDA is again raising its egg price forecast for the remainder of this year and 2025, but not as high as the peak," seen a few years ago, Bergquist wrote in a research note last month (with all puns intended). "Don’t put all your eggs in one basket; if [bird flu] infections continue, expect higher wholesale egg prices as we approach the fall and holiday season."
Seeing orange
Another disease is one of the reasons fueling the price increases for frozen orange juice, even though many Yahoo Finance readers still blamed the current administration.
A devastating bacterial tree disease, known colloquially as citrus greening, has affected 40% of orange plantations in Brazil, the largest orange producer in the world by far. The disease clogs channels that transport water within the tree, forcing it to drop fruit too early to process before eventually killing the tree.
In Florida, the world's third-largest orange juice producer, the disease has hacked production there by 93% over the last two decades, forcing growers to incur costly efforts to curb the disease.
The other culprit behind higher frozen OJ prices is bad weather.
Brazil's harvests are reeling from the El Nino effect, which has produced several seasons of unusually high temperatures, while in Florida, orange farms are still coming back online after the devastating effects of Hurricane Irma seven years ago and Hurricane Ian in 2022.
As a result of these shortages worldwide, OJ companies are getting picky about what to do with their limited orange supply. Since fresh juice is more popular and profitable than frozen, OJ producers are directing more of their production of oranges to that.
That's left the average price of a 12-ounce frozen can of OJ just a whisker from its all-time high of $4.278 set in April.
A favorite talking point among Republican lawmakers is noting how gas prices under the Biden administration are much higher than under the Trump administration. The claim is not wrong. The lowest average price per gallon under Biden so far was in January at $2.957, still higher than the highest average price under Trump — $2.208 in May 2018.
But it's not necessarily the policies of the current White House driving gas prices, one expert said. It's driven by supply and demand, and the last four years have seen dramatic forces impacting one side or the other of that equation.
"Prior to the pandemic, prices were kind of humming along," said Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy.com. "Then the pandemic abruptly caused a massive tilt in the demand side of the equation."
When President Donald Trump came into office in January 2017, gas prices had already dropped from two years earlier and stabilized in a narrow range. Prices plummeted in March and April of 2020, not because of anything Trump did, but because the music stopped during the pandemic.
Across the globe, countries shut down. No one traveled. People worked from home. Demand for gasoline plunged. Prices hit $1.721 a gallon in April 2020 and crept higher during the rest of Trump's term as society slowly reopened. All that deflation was pandemic-related.
A customer purchases gas at a station on June 11 in Chicago. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) ·(Scott Olson via Getty Images)
By the time Biden took office in January 2021, more and more people were back on the roads and flying in the skies — again as a result of COVID pent-up demand. Another huge inflation factor for gas prices under Biden was when Russia, the second-largest oil exporter in the world, invaded Ukraine in February 2022, causing "another massive jolt."
"And so then we went the other way, oil prices skyrocketed right to $130 a barrel, which was the highest we had seen since 2008," De Haan said. "After seeing the lowest prices we've seen in decades, we went to the extreme opposite and none of it had to do with who is in the White House."
Gas prices have since fallen back from that surge, as the Federal Reserve's interest rate hikes tempered demand.
"They started to normalize in 2023, they've further normalized in 2024, I would expect that trend to continue in 2025," De Haan said, "no matter who's elected."
Janna Herron is a Senior Columnist at Yahoo Finance. Follow her on X @JannaHerron.
