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US inflation cools, but tariffs threaten higher prints in coming months
We've had a surprisingly cool set of February US consumer price inflation prints of 0.2% month-on-month for both headline and core versus consensus predictions of 0.3%. This pulls the annual rate of headline inflation down to 2.8% from 3% while core inflation dips to 3.1% from 3.3%. To three decimal places the MoM change in core inflation was 0.227%, which remains above the 0.17% (black line in the chart below) trend that we need to average to bring inflation down to the Fed's 2% year-on-year target, but this is encouraging news for the Federal Reserve. The details are less rosy though with a substantial 4% MoM drop ... (full story)