Today’s update on consumer prices could hardly send a clearer message: pricing pressure is rising, and it’s no longer just about energy. Food prices are now a problem as well. Having jumped 6.0% over the past 12 months, food is now advancing faster than overall consumer inflation.
The Federal Reserve can make a political decision to attack the beast or leave him be. If it’s the latter, the central bank can’t blame ambiguous data for consumer prices as the rationale.
Last month, headline CPI rose 0.8% on a seasonally adjusted basis. Yes, that’s down from June’s 1.1% surge, although that’s cold comfort once you realize that 0.8% is still near the highest monthly readings for the past 20 years. Even more troubling is the fact that CPI has climbed 5.6% over the past year through July, the likes of which haven’t been seen since the early 1990s.
But how about our fail-safe response that core inflation is still under control? That, too, is starting to look thin. CPI less food and energy prices advanced 0.3% last month, which translates to a 2.5% annual pace. The hope that core inflation would slip down to the 2.0% neighborhood has, for the moment, faded.
This is a critical change. Recall that 2.0% is widely reported as the Fed’s upper band of tolerance for core CPI. The fact that Bernanke and company have stomached annual core inflation above 2.0% for several years has recently been rationalized as a temporary oversight that would soon be corrected once the economy slows, which in turn would take the edge off pricing pressures.