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  • 4 hours ago
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00:00It looks like we come in pretty much bang on the numbers that were expected.
00:03The headline CPI up three-tenths, which puts the year-over-year at 2.4 percent.
00:08No change from the month of January.
00:11The core is up by two-tenths of a percent as forecast.
00:14That's down a tick from January.
00:16And the year-over-year doesn't change, stays at two-and-a-half percent.
00:21So no inflation numbers to worry about in this report, at least from the headlines that we've got.
00:27I'll look at the details.
00:28But remember, this is all pre-Trump war.
00:31Mike, this is really important, though.
00:33This is the starting point.
00:34How are things set going into the war with Iran?
00:38How are things set going into this spike in energy?
00:41Energy, which was in the 60s and is now deep into the 80s, threatening to break back into the 90s
00:47on a material basis.
00:48And given the move we had on Sunday night, who knows?
00:51We could go back to triple digits again.
00:53Yeah, and that is the worry down the road.
00:55And it's not just really that we go back to triple digits and it hits the headline number because the
01:00Fed will look through that and expect it to be temporary.
01:04It's when it gets into the core, when it starts some of the – Lisa was talking about fertilizer, for
01:08example.
01:09When it starts to get into some of the consumer products out there, that would be a concern.
01:13And that very much depends on how long this all takes.
01:16So we've got to keep an eye on that.
01:18I'll look at some of the underlying numbers and see if we see any problems.
01:21But going into the report, not bad.
01:24One other caveat, though, is, of course, this is biased down because of the housing numbers, because of the government
01:28shortage – shutdown.
01:30So this is essentially not the same kind of reading we'll get with the PCE on Friday.
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