WASHINGTON: US inflation — set to be a key issue for incoming president Donald Trump — accelerated slightly last month, according to data published Wednesday, underscoring price pressures in the world’s largest economy.
The personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index rose 2.3 percent in the 12 months to October, up from 2.1 percent in September, the Commerce Department announced in a statement.
This was in line with the median forecast from economists surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
Despite the small uptick last month, headline PCE inflation remains close to the Fed’s long-term target of two percent, keeping the bank’s inflation fight largely on track.
The Fed — the independent US central bank — is responsible for tackling inflation and unemployment, largely by hiking or lowering interest rates to affect demand. This indirectly impacts the cost of borrowing for consumers and businesses, affecting everything from mortgages to car loans.
“What I think, particularly from a market perspective, catches your eye is that the inflation readings came in right as expected,” Nationwide chief economist Kathy Bostjancic told AFP.
“Those readings are encouraging enough, in our opinion, for the Federal Reserve to go ahead and cut rates 25 basis points next month,” she added. “But you know, it’s still a close call.”
The increase in inflation was driven by the services sector, where prices increased by 3.9 percent from a year earlier. Goods prices decreased 1.0 percent over the same period.
The largest contributor to the increase was healthcare, a category that includes both hospitals and outpatient services, the Commerce Department said. On a monthly basis, the PCE price index rose 0.2 percent between September and October, the same as the month prior, the Commerce Department said. This was also in line with expectations.
Excluding the volatile food and energy segments, the core PCE price index was up 2.8 percent from a year earlier, and by 0.3 percent from a month earlier.
Personal income rose 0.6 percent month-on-month, an acceleration from September, when it rose by 0.3 percent.
The rate of personal saving as a percentage of disposable income rose to 4.4 percent, up slightly from a revised figure of 4.1 percent a month earlier.
This indicates that consumers saved more of their money last month than they did in September. Trump’s victory in the presidential election on November 5 has been broadly welcomed in the financial markets, but there have also been some concerns that his widely-pledged rise in tariffs could prove to be inflationary.
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