Lou Whiteman

Well, that headline number is up a bit from 3.3% in March.

It's the highest annual rate we're seeing since May of 2023.

That spike, though, as you noted, it's being heavily fueled by we saw an energy index surge of 17.9% over the last 12 months.

Energy commodities spiked 29.2%.

Gas prices up 28.4%.

Fuel oil rising 54.3%.

Core inflation, right, so excluding volatile food and energy costs, also accelerated to 2.8% annually, hitting a monthly increase of 0.4%.

But consumers are seeing price hikes in everyday categories, right?

You know, electricity costs, motor vehicle maintenance, airline fares.

Obviously, the really immediate ramifications are the squeeze on the consumer.

I mean, we're seeing inflation outpace annual wage growth.

for the first time in three years that actually drove real inflation adjusted hourly earnings down by 0.3% based on this recent readout.

Now, there's been some speculation that this could maybe alter the Fed's playbook, right?

We're seeing fixed income markets are kind of adjusting to this higher for longer rate environment.

You've got some analysts floating the possibility of a rate hike.

But I think ultimately we're seeing a reality where there's this prolonged gap between sticky inflation.

We're seeing low yielding traditional bank accounts means the cash reserves might rapidly lose their purchasing power.

So there are a lot of first and second order impacts on consumers.

And it's something that's not just going to go away, even if the current conflict that we're seeing that's driving some of these price hikes is to abate in the next two, three weeks.

Yeah, I mean, the reverberations are basically across every sector you can think of.