Battling creeping inflation takes planning

USA TODAY, March, 2006 by John Waggoner

Your last experience with inflation might have been the undeserved B you got in Rocks and Smocks, that science course for art majors you took in college. But unlike grade inflation, monetary inflation is serious business indeed. You can construct an inflation-fighting portfolio of your own -- or the fund industry will be glad to sell you a prepackaged one.

Inflation fears sparked a modest stock sell-off Thursday, when the Commerce Department revised the index of core personal consumption expenditures, or PCE, higher. The core PCE, part of the calculation for the gross domestic product, is a relatively obscure number that measures consumer inflation, minus food and energy. Core PCE for the fourth quarter of 2005 was revised up, to a 2.4% annual rate, from a previous estimate...