In 2021, the Bank of Japan (BoJ) released a document supporting their new inflation format, the Price Sentiment Index (PSI). Breaking with long-standing tradition, the BoJ turned to alternative data as a means of forecasting (or, in a sense, now) inflation. While we have yet to get any data on its reliability since it was only initially offered in 2018, the Price Sentiment Index seems like a promising invention in a field where there may be very few of them. Surprisingly, the data collection process for PSI is not that complicated. It can…