“Inflation is still much too high, but the trend is in the right direction, and the Fed is ready to take a break from raising interest rates,” Chris Zaccarelli, chief investment officer for Independent Advisor Alliance, said in a statement.
The Fed would like to see inflation (as measured by the core Personal Consumption Expenditures index) settle in at 2%. While 4% is a far cry from 9.1%, it’s also still well above the desired inflation target for the Federal Reserve, which has been in the throes of a historic monetary tightening campaign since March 2022. “It’s another step in the right direction,” Nancy Vanden Houten, lead US economist at Oxford Economics, said in an interview with CNN.Ī drop in energy prices and a slowdown in food price hikes helped bring down the headline number, as did the influence of what is known as base effects: A year ago, inflation was marching upward and setting fresh 41-year highs before topping out at 9.1% in June. This time last year, that CPI print was more than double at 8.6%. It’s the 11th consecutive month that inflation has slowed, and it’s a welcome reprieve from the painful shock of persistently high inflation endured during the past two years. Economists were expecting prices to increase by 0.2% from April to May. On a monthly basis, prices ticked up 0.1%. That represents a sharp pullback from April’s 4.9% and is slightly below economists’ expectations for a 4.1% gain, according to Refinitiv. The Consumer Price Index, a key inflation gauge that measures price changes for a basket of goods and services, increased 4% for the year ending in May. US inflation is leaving those sky-high days behind: Consumer prices in May rose at the slowest annual pace since March 2021, according to data released Tuesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
0 kommentar(er)
