Get caught up.
by David Rovella
Bloomberg.com
When US inflation peaked above 7% back in 2022, the culprits were everywhere—spread across goods and services. Now, with inflation back below 3%,the problem is mainly about housing. Hotter-than-expected readings for the rental category in the first few months of the year are a big reason the Federal Reserve held back on those rate cuts Wall Street was whining for. “We thought we basically understood the mechanical, short-run model of how much housing inflation should be coming down,” said Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee. “And it hasn’t come down as fast as we thought it was going to have come down at this point.”
[…] Even the rental inflation problem itself isn’t particularly broad-based anymore, geographically anyway. There’s a big difference between the situation in the Northeast and Midwest, where high inflation is lingering, and the West and South, where it’s moderating rapidly.