Inflation at 3.1% Reflects Stubborn Pricing Pressure, Clouding Outlook for Fed Rate Cuts

Inflation cooled again in January but came in above Wall Street’s expectations, another sign that the Federal Reserve’s path to interest-rate cuts is far from settled.

The Labor Department reported Tuesday that consumer prices rose 3.1% in January from a year earlier, versus a December gain of 3.4%. That marked the lowest reading since June.

Still, the consumer-price index was higher than the predicted 2.9%, a disappointment for investors who hope the Fed will cut rates sooner rather than later. Rate cuts tend to help stock prices by boosting economic activity and reducing competition from bonds for investor dollars.

Stocks fell and bond yields rose after the release. Interest-rate futures, which before Tuesday’s report implied the central bank would probably begin cutting rates by its May meeting, now suggest a June start date is more likely.

Where the Fed could go from here

Investors’ belief that Fed cuts were imminent has helped fuel the rally in stocks. The Dow Jones Industrial Average on Monday hit its 12th record close of 2024.

But Tuesday’s inflation report underscores why Fed officials have been dismissive of such expectations, and it could provide ammunition to officials who want to wait until the middle of the year before cutting interest rates. Some Fed officials have suggested that the pace of improvement over the past six months might overstate underlying progress in containing price pressures.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell has said officials want to see more evidence that inflation is returning to its 2% goal, which is measured against a separate gauge to be released later this month by the Commerce Department.

“It’s not that the data aren’t good enough. It’s that there’s really six months of data,” Powell said in an interview on “60 Minutes” earlier this month. “It doesn’t need to be better than what we’ve seen, or even as good. It just needs to be good.”

Core prices, which exclude food and energy items in an effort to better track inflation’s underlying trend, were up 3.9% in January. That was equal to December’s gain, which was the lowest since mid-2021.

From a month earlier, overall prices were up a seasonally adjusted 0.3%, and core prices were up 0.4%—larger gains than economists expected.

Two measures of inflation

The Fed’s preferred measure of inflation has been running cooler than the Labor Department’s, and analysts said that could continue in January. The figures released Tuesday calculate medical care and airfares differently, and those categories were especially strong in January. The Labor Department’s measure also puts a much higher weight on shelter costs, which for both owners and renters are derived from rents. Shelter costs accounted for 0.23 percentage point of the monthly gain in overall prices in January. Shelter costs were up 0.6% month over month.

Some Fed officials have said they are looking for evidence that a slowdown in price pressures is broadening beyond goods such as used cars, which have seen prices decline over the past year. Tuesday’s figure showed the opposite: Price declines accelerated for goods while price increases accelerated for services.

And prices are still far above where they were before the pandemic—especially for items that most Americans buy often, like groceries.

The sting of those past price increases might be part of why so many Americans remain down on the economy. An analysis conducted by Goldman Sachs economists suggests that frustration with high prices levels might have contributed to low confidence readings that persisted in the early 1980s even after inflation had slipped sharply.

“It does seem like it takes a while for confidence to recover, in part because people are focused on levels rather than changes,” said Goldman chief economist Jan Hatzius.

The Labor Department’s measure of overall consumer prices was up 19.6% this January from four years earlier, just before the pandemic hit. In contrast, prices were up 8.9% in the four years ended January 2020.

Economists generally expect inflation to cool this year, though they caution the process could be bumpy. Cooling prices for newly signed leases, for example, should eventually translate into lower shelter costs.

“I can tell inflation has gotten better,” said Mike Poore, of Henderson, Ky. “That’s definitely a good thing. It’s a shame it’s not happening quicker.”

The high cost of groceries

A Bank of America Institute analysis of customer data found households tended to make far more transactions a month for food and drinks at restaurants and bars, for groceries and for gasoline than they do for other items. Labor Department figures show that prices in all three of those frequent-transaction categories are higher, relative to before the pandemic, than prices overall.

Research from University of California, Berkeley economist Ulrike Malmendier and three co-authors found that prices for items that people buy more often play an outsize role in framing their inflation expectations. “In terms of what gets ingrained in people’s brains, it’s stuff that they purchase frequently,” she said.

Other research Malmendier has conducted examines the scarring effects of inflation episodes, which can have persistent, and potentially costly, effects on people’s financial decisions. She is heartened by the fact that inflation has retreated relatively quickly from the 9.1% it hit in June 2022—a contrast to the experience of the late 1970s and early 1980s, when inflation remained elevated for years.

“I’m a little less worried about long-lasting effects than I was in 2022,” she said.

Write to Justin Lahart at [email protected] and Nick Timiraos at [email protected]