by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street
Ugly inflation in services drives up the 3-month “core CPI” for 7th month, to 4.5% annualized, worst in a year, and the 3-month overall CPI to worst since Nov 2022.
So inflation behaved very badly again in March. January was terrible, but it was kind of written off as maybe one of those January blips. February was bad, and so the January-blip story began to fall apart. And the Consumer Price Index for March, released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics today, was just as bad as in February.
It was driven by ugly inflation in “core services” which dominate consumer spending – even as prices of durable goods continued to decline, and as food prices remained relatively stable at very high levels. That energy prices started rising again, after their vertiginous plunge, didn’t help either.