Amy Scott

The metaphor of the day is shoes.

As in, when is the other one going to drop?

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace.

In Denver, I'm Amy Scott, in for Kai Risdahl.

It's Monday, May 11th.

Good to have you with us.

I hate to start the week off on a down note after that surprisingly buoyant jobs report we had just before the weekend.

It showed strong job creation and low unemployment in April.

But the other economic shoe, and there's that metaphor, drops tomorrow with the latest inflation numbers for April.

the Consumer Price Index, and forecasters are expecting it to show a big increase in prices, led, no surprise, by gas and energy.

Marketplace's Mitchell Hartman has the outlook.

Economists expect headline inflation in April to come in at 3.8% year over year.

In February, before the Iran war started, it was 2.4%.

Jay Hatfield says we've seen this before when inflation spiked during the 1970s OPEC oil embargo.

So far, we haven't seen core inflation rising sharply.

What that means is people's actual wages, once you adjust for inflation, will likely either be flat or in decline.

And he says even if the Iran war ends tomorrow and supply chains return to normal, price increases already in the pipeline will still keep inflation running high through at least the end of the year.

I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace.

On that last point, an end to the war was looking even more distant today after President Trump rejected a counteroffer from Iran.

Wall Street, though, continued to look the other way.