Summary via TLDRThis:
WASHINGTON (AP) — A measure of consumer prices that is closely monitored by the Federal Reserve fell last month to its lowest level since March 2021, the latest sign that inflation in the United States is steadily cooling from its once-painful highs.
The inflation report that the Commerce Department issued Friday also showed that Americans’ willingness to keep spending, despite two years of high inflation and 11 Fed rate hikes over 17 months, remains a powerful driver of the economy.
Consumer spending rose 0.5% from May to June, up from 0.2% the previous month.
This can occur as persistent consumer demand enables more companies to raise prices, thereby keeping inflation above the Fed’s target and potentially causing the central bank to raise rates even higher.
Powell declined to offer any signal of the central bank’s likely next moves.
The Fed’s policymakers consider core prices a better measure of where inflation might be headed.
Can somebody tell me if that mean prices will continue to increase but at a slower rate, or that prices will start to come back down?
I don’t think prices are ever going to come down in any significant way.
Unless there’s national deflation, but if that happens we have bigger problems.
Overall prices will increase slightly and at a slower ratewhich is fine. We do not want prices to decrease overall. That causes a whole host of issues. What we want is low, consistent inflation so that you know roughly what prices will be next year.
Some things will decrease in price, of course, but overall prices went up very slightly. One other thing to note is that this specific indicator does not take food and energy prices into account. There is another indicator for that.
Well crap. Food prices were what I was primarily thinking about.
Thanks for the answer.
It looks like the inflation rate for food is coming down but it is still higher than typical. The war in Ukraine and bad crop yields in China because of heat waves are likely responsible for that. Energy prices look like they have dropped pretty significantly though.
https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/food-inflation-in-the-united-states/
Because the paragraphs of the summary are indented, they appear as monospaced text with a horizontal scrollbar in the Lemmy web interface. This makes the summary unreadable to web users.
Suggestion: Do not indent paragraphs in Markdown input.
Summary is reprinted below without indentation:
WASHINGTON (AP) — A measure of consumer prices that is closely monitored by the Federal Reserve fell last month to its lowest level since March 2021, the latest sign that inflation in the United States is steadily cooling from its once-painful highs.
The inflation report that the Commerce Department issued Friday also showed that Americans’ willingness to keep spending, despite two years of high inflation and 11 Fed rate hikes over 17 months, remains a powerful driver of the economy.
Consumer spending rose 0.5% from May to June, up from 0.2% the previous month.
This can occur as persistent consumer demand enables more companies to raise prices, thereby keeping inflation above the Fed’s target and potentially causing the central bank to raise rates even higher.
Powell declined to offer any signal of the central bank’s likely next moves.
The Fed’s policymakers consider core prices a better measure of where inflation might be headed.
Thanks for the heads up. I removed the indents so hopefully that helps. I’ll also see if there is a setting in TLDRThis to get rid of those.
Oh, so that’s what that was. It was doing that in the Connect app too, but not monospace.
