"The January numbers certainly were high -- there’s no way you can get around that," says Dr. Walden, a North Carolina Cooperative Extension specialist. "But if you look at details, most of this was again due to energy and particularly gas prices.

"Gas prices went up in January. If you strip out gas prices and some other volatile components, you see that inflation rose at a much more modest annual rate of 2.5 percent," he adds. "I think what this suggests again is that we don’t have a broad-based inflation problem in the country; instead we have an energy price problem.

"The important thing I think is that higher energy prices have not bled over into other prices -- at least yet," he concludes.