The Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge cooled further last month, the Associated Press reports, even as the economy kept growing briskly.
Today’s government report showed that prices rose just 0.2% from November to December, a pace broadly consistent with pre-pandemic levels and barely above the Fed’s 2% annual target. Compared with a year ago, prices increased 2.6%, the same as in the previous month.
Excluding volatile food and energy costs, prices also rose just 0.2% from month to month. Compared with a year earlier, so-called “core” prices climbed 2.9% in December — the smallest such increase since March 2021. Economists consider core prices a better gauge of the likely path of inflation.
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