The gauges that actually matter: headline vs core, the Trimmed-Mean PCE, producer prices, market expectations, and real wages. Real FRED data — so you can see whether the inflation story is broad, or just energy.
Headline CPI is running 3.8% and still rising, well off its 9.0% 2022 peak — still above the Fed's 2% target.
Strip food and energy and Core CPI is 3.0% (roughly flat); the Trimmed-Mean PCE — the least-noisy trend gauge — sits at 2.4%, much closer to target.
Producer prices (PPI) are 13.1% — a 9.3pp gap over consumer inflation. A wide producer-over-consumer spread is a margin squeeze on businesses, not proof of broad consumer inflation ahead.
The bond market isn't panicking: 10-year breakevens (2.3%) and the 5y5y forward (2.2%) sit near 2%, so long-run expectations look anchored despite the energy-driven prints.
Wages are growing 3.5% but real (inflation-adjusted) wages are negative at -0.3% — households are losing ground, which removes fuel for a self-reinforcing wage-price spiral.
Bottom line: the hot readings are concentrated in producer and energy prices, while the underlying consumer trend and market expectations sit closer to target. Strip the energy, and the broad inflation story largely fades.
Auto-generated from the latest FRED readings and their 3-month trend — updates with the data, not a hand-written opinion.
Year-over-year %, monthly since 2014. PPI spiking while Trimmed-Mean PCE and Core CPI sit far closer to the 2% target tells you the pressure is producer/energy-side, not a broad consumer spiral.
Both near 2% → the bond market still sees the spike as transitory, not entrenched. (2026-06-15)
When real wages are negative, households are losing ground — which *prevents* a self-reinforcing wage-price spiral. (2026-05)
Year-over-year % at each anchor (Trimmed-Mean & breakevens as reported). Today rhymes with 2008 — a producer/energy-led spike with the consumer trend contained — not 2022's broad, entrenched inflation.
| Regime | Headline | Core | PPI | Trimmed | 10y BE |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 · dot-com | 3.3% | 2.3% | 6.4% | 2.3% | — |
| 2008 · GFC peak | 5.5% | 2.3% | 19.2% | 2.7% | 2.5% |
| 2020 · COVID | 0.2% | 1.0% | -5.8% | 1.8% | 1.1% |
| 2022 · peak | 8.5% | 5.5% | 20.9% | 4.7% | 2.7% |
| Now | 3.8% | 3.0% | 13.1% | 2.4% | 2.3% |
2008: PPI ~19% while Core held ~2.3% → disinflation followed. 2022: Core 5.5%, Trimmed 4.7% → the real, broad thing. 2020: a deflation scare. The tell isn't the headline — it's whether core & trimmed are elevated too.
PPI measures prices producers receive (heavily commodity/energy-weighted), while CPI measures what consumers pay. A wide PPI-over-CPI gap means producers are eating cost increases they can't fully pass on — a margin squeeze, not necessarily future consumer inflation.
The Dallas Fed's Trimmed-Mean PCE removes the most extreme price moves (both up and down) each month to reveal the underlying trend. It is the gauge former Fed governor Kevin Warsh is associated with favoring, and it tends to be less noisy than headline or core.
A proprietary Rosenberg Research metric that takes Core CPI and further strips items closely tied to oil — airfares, delivery, utilities — to isolate non-energy inflation. Rosenberg has cited it running near 1.8% (below target). It is his own construction and is not reproducible from public FRED data, so we show the official cuts alongside his figure rather than recompute it.
Market-based expectations — the 10-year breakeven (TIPS) and the 5-year, 5-year forward rate — have stayed close to 2% even through energy shocks, which is the Fed's main test of whether a spike is becoming entrenched.
Source: U.S. BLS, BEA, Federal Reserve (via FRED). Headline/Core CPI, Core PCE and PPI are year-over-year; Trimmed-Mean PCE and breakevens are as reported. Updated monthly. Not investment advice.