AFMC - Beneath The Skin Of CPI Inflation March: Inflation Behaves Very Badly Saga Far From Over

2024-04-11 05:00:00 ET

Summary

• Core services CPI jumped by 5.6% annualized in March from February.
• Core CPI, which excludes food and energy, rose by 4.4% annualized in March from February, the same increase as in February.
• The Fed has been in desperate search of confidence that inflation would continue to cool after the Amazing Cooling through mid-2023.

Ugly inflation in services drives up the 3-month "core CPI" for 7th month, to 4.5% annualized, worst in a year, and the 3-month overall CPI to worst since Nov 2022.

So inflation behaved very badly again in March. January was terrible, but it was kind of written off as maybe one of those January blips. February was bad, and so the January-blip story began to fall apart. And the Consumer Price Index for March, released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Wednesday, was just as bad as in February....

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