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The Federal Reserve may have pretty much just hit its 2% inflation target

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Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell arrives to a news conference following the September meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee at the William McChesney Martin Jr. Federal Reserve Board Building on September 18, 2024 in Washington, DC. 

Anna Moneymaker | Getty Images

This week’s inflation data provided more evidence that the Federal Reserve is nearing its objective, fresh on the heels of the central bank’s dramatic interest rate cut just a few weeks ago.

Consumer and producer price indexes for September both came in around expectations, showing that inflation is drifting down to the central bank’s 2% target.

In fact, economists at Goldman Sachs think the Fed may already be there.

The Wall Street investment bank on Friday projected that the Commerce Department’s personal consumption expenditures price index for September will show a 12-month inflation rate of 2.04% when it is released later this month.

If Goldman is correct, that number would get rounded down to 2% and be right in line with the Fed’s long-held objective, a little over two years after inflation spiked to a 40-year high and unleashed an aggressive round of interest rate hikes. The Fed prefers the PCE as its inflation gauge though it uses a variety of inputs to make decisions.

“The overall trend over 12-, 18 months is clearly that inflation has come down a lot, and the job market has cooled to a level which is around where we think full employment is,” Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee said in a CNBC interview Thursday after the latest consumer price data was released. “We’d like to get both of them to stay in the space where they are right now.”

Some obstacles ahead

While keeping inflation at bay may not be an easy task, the latest data indicate that though prices are not receding from their troublesome heights of a few years ago, the rate at which they are increasing is pulling back.

The 12-month rate for the all-items consumer price index was at 2.4% in September, while the producer price index, a proxy for wholesale inflation and a leading gauge for pipeline pressures, showed an annual rate of 1.8%.

Goldman’s projection that the PCE index is heading to 2% is also about in line with tracking from the Cleveland Fed.

The central bank district’s “inflation nowcasting” dashboard pegs the 12-month headline PCE rate at 2.06% for September, which would get rounded up to 2.1%. However, on an annualized pace, inflation for the entire third quarter is running at just a 1.4% rate — well below the Fed’s 2% goal.

To be sure, there are some caveats to show that policymakers still have some work to do.

Core inflation, which excludes food and energy and is a metric that the Fed considers a better measure of longer-term trends, is expected to run at a 2.6% annual rate for the PCE in September, according to Goldman. Using just the consumer price index, core inflation was even worse in September, at 3.3%.

Fed officials, though, see the unexpectedly high shelter inflation numbers as a major driver of the core measure, which they figure will ease as a lower trend in rents works its way through the data.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell last week, addressing the rent situation, said he expects housing inflation to continue to recede while “broader economic conditions also set the table for further disinflation.”

From a policy standpoint, lower inflation opens the door for the Fed to keep cutting rates, particularly as it turns its attention to the labor market, though there’s some trepidation about how quickly it should move.

September’s half percentage point reduction to a fed funds range of 4.75% to 5% was unprecedented for an economy in expansion, and the Fed at the very least is expected to return to its normal quarter-point pace. Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic even said Thursday he’d be open to skipping a move altogether at the November meeting.

“Aggressive easing would risk spiking consumer demand just as it is settling into a sustainable pace,” PNC senior economist Kurt Rankin said in a post-PPI analysis. “This result would in turn put pressure on businesses to meet that demand, re-igniting gains in those businesses’ own costs as they jockey for the necessary resources to do so.”

Futures traders, meanwhile, are betting on a near-certainty that the Fed cuts rates by a quarter point at both the November and December meetings.

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Economics

UK inflation September 2024

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The Canary Wharf business district is seen in the distance behind autumnal leaves on October 09, 2024 in London, United Kingdom.

Dan Kitwood | Getty Images News | Getty Images

LONDON — Inflation in the U.K. dropped sharply to 1.7% in September, the Office for National Statistics said Wednesday.

Economists polled by Reuters had expected the headline rate to come in at a higher 1.9% for the month, in the first dip of the print below the Bank of England’s 2% target since April 2021.

Inflation has been hovering around that level for the last four months, and came in at 2.2% in August.

Core inflation, which excludes energy, food, alcohol and tobacco, came in at 3.2% for the month, down from 3.6% in August and below the 3.4% forecast of a Reuters poll.

Price rises in the services sector, the dominant portion of the U.K. economy, eased significantly to 4.9% last month from 5.6% in August, now hitting its lowest rate since May 2022.

Core and services inflation are key watch points for Bank of England policymakers as they mull whether to cut interest rates again at their November meeting.

As of Wednesday morning, market pricing put an 80% probability on a November rate cut ahead of the latest inflation print. Analysts on Tuesday said lower wage growth reported by the ONS this week had supported the case for a cut. The BOE reduced its key rate by 25 basis points in August before holding in September.

Within the broader European region, inflation in the euro zone dipped below the European Central Bank’s 2% target last month, hitting 1.8%, according to the latest data.

This is a breaking news story and will be updated shortly.

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Economics

Why Larry Hogan’s long-odds bid for a Senate seat matters

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FEW REPUBLICAN politicians differ more from Donald Trump than Larry Hogan, the GOP Senate candidate in Maryland. Consider the contrasts between a Trump rally and a Hogan event. Whereas Mr Trump prefers to take the stage and riff in front of packed arenas, Mr Hogan spent a recent Friday night chatting with locals at a waterfront wedding venue in Baltimore County. Mr Hogan’s stump speech, at around ten minutes, felt as long as a single off-script Trump tangent. Mr Trump delights in defying his advisers; Mr Hogan fastidiously sticks to talking points about bipartisanship, good governance and overcoming tough odds. Put another way, Mr Hogan’s campaign is something Mr Trump is rarely accused of being: boring. But it is intriguing.

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Economics

Polarisation by education is remaking American politics

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DEPENDING ON where exactly you find yourself, western Pennsylvania can feel Appalachian, Midwestern, booming or downtrodden. No matter where, however, this part of the state feels like the centre of the American political universe. Since she became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris has visited Western Pennsylvania six times—more often than Philadelphia, on the other side of the state. She will mark her seventh on a trip on October 14th, to the small city of Erie, where Donald Trump also held a rally recently. Democratic grandees flit through Pittsburgh regularly. It is where Ms Harris chose to unveil the details of her economic agenda, and it is where Barack Obama visited on October 10th to deliver encouragement and mild chastisement. “Do not just sit back and hope for the best,” he admonished. “Get off your couch and vote.”

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