John Carney 13 Feb 2024
Sorry, Folks, Inflation Ain’t Going Nowhere
Inflation, having long since overstayed its welcome, announced on Tuesday that it was just getting comfortable.
Wall Street has largely ignored the signals over the past few months that inflation was no longer on a path toward moderation. After declining from the roaring days of 2022, inflation spent the first half of 2023 in decline. But sometime last summer—not coincidentally, right around the time the Fed stopped raising rates—it regained its hold on the economy.
The January figures released Tuesday showed the consumer price index (CPI) rose 0.3 percent from the previous month, an acceleration from the previous month’s 0.2 percent. This was the third straight acceleration in the month-to-month figure and the fastest rate since September.
The 12-month rate of inflation declined to 3.1 percent from 3.4 percent, but this was largely because last January’s very high 0.5 percent increase dropped out of the back end of the calculation. If you annualize the January figure, headline inflation ran at a pace of 3.7 percent.
Core inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, rose 0.4 percent. This followed two months in which core CPI had stalled at 0.3 percent. To get a sense of how big a 0.4 percent monthly increase is, you only need to annualize it. If inflation ran this hot for 12 months, we’d have 4.8 percent inflation. This is the worst monthly figure since April of last year.
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https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2024/02/13/breitbart-business-digest-inflation-comes-roaring-back/
