From Paul Wiseman’s article for the Associated Press…in rust, with my comments in blue:
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. producer prices fell unexpectedly last month, dropping 0.1% from July. Unexpectedly? How many times have we heard/read that since Trump took office and the inflation/stock market crash we were warned about didn’t happen?
The Labor Department reported Wednesday that its producer price index — which captures inflation in the supply chain before it hits consumers — showed that wholesale inflation decelerated in August after advancing 0.7% in July. Wholesale services prices fell 0.2% from July on smaller profit margins at retailers and wholesalers, which might be a sign that those companies are absorbing the cost of President Donald Trump’s sweeping taxes — tariffs — on imports. It also might be a sign that the doomsday predictions we were drowning in were incorrect. Why not mention that too, Paul?
Compared with a year earlier, producer prices rose 2.6%. Yep. That’s good news, not bad news.
Excluding volatile food and energy prices, so-called core producer prices also fell 0.1% from July and were up 2.8% from a year earlier. Gee, some more “unexpected” good news.
The numbers were lower than economists had forecast. Trump’s tariffs were widely expected to send prices higher, but so far their impact has been muted. “The big picture remains that tariff effects are feeding through only slowly,” economist Stephen Brown of Capital Economics wrote in a commentary. Their impact hasn’t been “muted”. It is what it is, even though the geniuses warning us about a crashed economy have, so far, been dead wrong.
The wholesale price report came out day before the Labor Department releases its consumer price index. The CPI is expected to show that consumer price inflation picked up slightly last month, rising 0.3% from July, an uptick from a 0.2% increase the month before. Compared with a year earlier, consumer prices are expected to have risen 2.9% in August, up from a 2.7% year-over-year increase in July. Forgetting that there just might be a third “unexpected” better-than-predicted result here…even if it is correct, it would be nice to mention/remind readers that the day Trump took office inflation was at 3.0. So even if the CPI rose from last month, it is still below what Trump inherited from Biden.
Bottom line: another month goes by without the economic cataclysm we were assured would take place due to Trump’s tariff policies.
Oh, by the way, the Dow Jones Average hit a new all-time high yesterday. And the NASDAQ and S&P 500 have also hit new highs in the last week.
Just thought I’d mention….
