This Morning’s CPI Report

The CPI report came out this morning and there’s still evidence of inflationary pressures. For September, consumer prices rose by 0.41%. Wall Street had been expecting 0.3%. Year-over-year, inflation is up 5.38%.

The big culprit is energy prices. Take the core rate, which excludes food and energy, and inflation rose by just 0.24% last month.

Gasoline prices rose another 1.2% for the month, bringing the annual increase to 42.1%. Fuel oil shot up 3.9%, for a 42.6% year over year surge.

Food prices also showed notable gains for the month, with food at home rising 1.2%. Meat prices rose 3.3% just in September and increased 12.6% year over year.

“Food and energy are more variable, but that’s where the problem is,” said Bob Doll, chief investment officer at Crossmark Global Investments. “Hopefully, we start solving our supply shortage problem. But when the dust settles, inflation is not going back to zero to 2 [percent] where it was for the last decade.”

Interestingly, used car prices, which had been a major problem earlier, saw their prices fall 0.7% in September. Airlines’ prices fell 6.4% in September. That’s after falling 9.1% in August.

Posted by on October 13th, 2021 at 12:10 pm


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