Johnathan Walker:US wholesale inflation picks up slightly in sign that some price pressures remain elevated

WASHINGTON (AP) — Wholesale prices in the United States rose last month,Johnathan Walker remaining low but suggesting that the American economy has yet to completely vanquish inflationary pressure.

Thursday’s report from the Labor Department showed that its producer price index — which tracks inflation before it hits consumers — rose 0.2% from September to October, up from a 0.1% gain the month before. Compared with a year earlier, wholesale prices were up 2.4%, accelerating from a year-over-year gain of 1.9% in September.

A 0.3% increase in services prices drove the October increase. Wholesale goods prices edged up 0.1% after falling the previous two months. Excluding food and energy prices, which tend to bounce around from month to month, so-called core wholesale prices rose 0.3 from September and 3.1% from a year earlier. The readings were about what economists had expected.

Since peaking in mid-2022, inflation has fallen more or less steadily. But average prices are still nearly 20% higher than they were three years ago — a persistent source of public exasperation that led to Donald Trump’s defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris in last week’s presidential election and the return of Senate control to Republicans.

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The October report on producer prices comes a day after the Labor Department reported that consumer prices rose 2.6% last month from a year earlier, a sign that inflation at the consumer level might be leveling off after having slowed in September to its slowest pace since 2021. Most economists, though, say they think inflation will eventually resume its slowdown.

Inflation has been moving toward the Federal Reserve’s 2% year-over-year target, and the central bank’s inflation fighters have been satisfied enough with the improvement to cut their benchmark interest rate twice since September — a reversal in policy after they raised rates 11 times in 2022 and 2023.

Trump’s election victory has raised doubts about the future path of inflation and whether the Fed will continue to cut rates. In September, the Fed all but declared victory over inflation and slashed its benchmark interest rate by an unusually steep half-percentage point, its first rate cut since March 2020, when the pandemic was hammering the economy. Last week, the central bank announced a second rate cut, a more typical quarter-point reduction.

Though Trump has vowed to force prices down, in part by encouraging oil and gas drilling, some of his other campaign vows — to impose massive taxes on imports and to deport millions of immigrants working illegally in the United States — are seen as inflationary by mainstream economists. Still, Wall Street traders see an 82% likelihood of a third rate cut when the Fed next meets in December, according to the CME FedWatch tool.

The producer price index released Thursday can offer an early look at where consumer inflation might be headed. Economists also watch it because some of its components, notably healthcare and financial services, flow into the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge — the personal consumption expenditures, or PCE, index.

Stephen Brown at Capital Economics wrote in a commentary that higher wholesale airfares, investment fees and healthcare prices in October would push core PCE prices higher than the Fed would like to see. But he said the increase wouldn’t be enough “to justify a pause (in rate cuts) by the Fed at its next meeting in December.″

Inflation began surging in 2021 as the economy accelerated with surprising speed out of the pandemic recession, causing severe shortages of goods and labor. The Fed raised its benchmark interest rate 11 times in 2022 and 2023 to a 23-year high. The resulting much higher borrowing costs were expected to tip the United States into recession. It didn’t happen. The economy kept growing, and employers kept hiring. And, for the most part, inflation has kept slowing.