By Denny Gulino
WASHINGTON (MaceNews) – Last month’s strong rate of increase in consumer prices reported Wednesday was the same, and for some major categories less, than in the previous month, suggesting that mathematical base effects will force indicated inflation to decelerate later this year.
Most significantly, shelter costs, that contribute a third of all costs in the Consumer Price Index, rose 0.3%, a tad less than in December and less than the previous four months.
What’s called owner equivalent rents, the cost of home ownership, have gone up just 0.4% from a year earlier, less than the 0.6% rise for the January inflation measure as a whole. Rents as measured by the industry are a couple of percentage points below their pre-pandemic level.
The day’s screaming headline about a fresh 40-year high in the annual inflation rate, to 7.5%, is actually a lagging remnant of the extraordinarily low comparison with January 2021. It’s exaggerated because price increases a year ago were abnormally subdued, hit hard by the pandemic.
There will be less exaggeration from now on through the year because that comparison with year-ago figures won’t be as dramatic. While the exaggeration factor will be less, that doesn’t guarantee actual price changes won’t continue their upward path, perhaps overwhelming the diminished base effect. But that also is considered less likely as major categories, like new and used car prices, moderated in January.
U.S. stocks were galvanized into a steep downward trajectory in the afternoon after St. Louis Fed Pres. James Bullard crystallized rate-hike fears by telling Bloomberg he wouldn’t mind a full 1% fed funds rate hike by July.
Other Fedspeakers have been more cautious in remarks before the CPI report, with Cleveland Fed Pres. Loreetta Mester Tuesday pointing out the only part of inflation’s aggressiveness is due to Fed accommodation. Rate hikes aren’t an antidote to supply-chain disruptions and oil supply which are major inflation boosters..
While presumably dampening demand, rate hikes also are usually aimed at what is considered excess superheated consumption. The latest GDP level is only 3.1% above its pre-pandemic level, reflecting a rebound from pandemic lockdowns and not necessarily superheated runaway spending.
The CPI’s core rate of inflation rose another 0.6%, the same as December and October and a tenth more than November. With shelter its main flywheel, slow to move up but dominant when it does, the future of shelter costs could back off their outsized September-through-December increases as they appeared to do already in January.
Even without rate hikes, accelerated to Bullard-like momentum or not, policymakers and many private economists expect inflation’s rate of increase to decelerate this year. Prices themselves seldom give back past increases however except during recessions, for which there is seen very little probability this year. Yet to quench inflation, all they have to do is keep going up more slowly.
Contact this reporter: denny@macenews.com
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