Inflation

The stubborn inflation the Fed can't shake

Core PCE inflation ran at 4.6 per cent year-on-year in May, and Federal Reserve officials can think of little else.

Britain's mortgage crunch returns

Two-year gilt yields have risen above five per cent because UK core inflation will not come down, and mortgage rates have followed them to levels last seen in the global financial crisis.

Memorial Day: The debt deal is done. Now comes the bill

Negotiators agreed on 27 May to suspend the debt ceiling, and Washington's political drama ended in its usual anticlimax.

Why core inflation stopped falling

Headline consumer prices rose 4.9 per cent in the year to April, the first reading below 5 per cent in two years.

OPEC just made the Fed's job harder

OPEC+ surprised oil markets on Sunday, 2 April, by announcing a production cut of 1.16 million barrels per day.

Powell signals bigger hikes are back

Jerome Powell told the Senate Banking Committee that the Federal Reserve is ready to go back to rate rises of 50 basis points if the economic data stay hot.

Short-term bonds are having a terrible month

Last year's inflation just got rewritten

On 10 February the Bureau of Labor Statistics published its routine annual seasonal revisions to the consumer price index, and in doing so rewrote the inflation record for late 2022.

The inflation number the Fed secretly cares about

US consumer prices rose 6.5 per cent in the year to December, confirming that headline inflation is coming down from its summer peak.

China reopens, and the world gets a new inflation problem

Markets have decided that China's eventual exit from zero-Covid will be pure good news for global inflation.

Cyber Monday: What the discounts say about inflation

Americans spent an estimated $11.3 billion online on Cyber Monday 2022, according to Adobe Analytics, a record in nominal terms for the annual shopping day.

The bond market is screaming recession

The gap between two-year and ten-year US Treasury yields reached minus seventy-five basis points in late November 2022, the deepest inversion since Paul Volcker was crushing inflation in the early 1980s.

Rents are already falling. Official data hasn't noticed

The shelter index in the US consumer price report rose 0.8 per cent in October, its steepest monthly rise in more than three decades, and no single line in the American economic data is doing more to mislead.

One good inflation report does not make a trend

Headline US inflation came in at 7.7 per cent for October, down from 8.2 per cent in September, and core inflation eased to 6.3 per cent.

The inflation the Fed can't fix: your haircut and your dentist

The August consumer price index showed core prices up 0.6 per cent on the month, and with it the limits of monetary policy.

Don't bet on inflation falling just because the maths says so

Equity traders are treating a slowdown in the statistics as if it were a truce in the economy.