Inflation Comes Roaring Back

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.

When inflation appeared to have stopped waning at the end of last year, those proclaiming that it had been decisively defeated frequently pointed to the three- and six-month annualized rates as evidence that you could more or less ignore the recent figures in favor of the trend. That’s a lot less helpful to the dove case now.

The three-month annualized core inflation rate rose to four percent in January from 3.3 percent. The six-month annualized core rate rose to 3.6 percent from 3.2 percent. The three-month annualized headline inflation came in at 2.8 percent, up from 1.9 percent a month ago. The six-month annualized rate rose to 3.3 percent from 3.1 percent.  …full story