Inflation jumped year-over-year in March amid speculation over whether the rate of inflation is really decelerating, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics release on Wednesday.
The consumer price index (CPI), a broad measure of the price of everyday goods, increased 3.5 percent on an annual basis in March and 0.4 percent month-over-month, compared to 3.2 percent in February year-over-year, according to the BLS. Core CPI, which excludes the volatile categories of energy and food, remained high, rising 3.8 percent year-over-year in March, compared to 3.8 percent in February.
“Indexes like the median CPI and trimmed-mean CPI remove outliers and they show inflation much higher than the headline, or even the core, inflation rates,” E.J. Antoni, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “That tells us the rise in prices is widespread and not simply one or two volatile components jumping for a few months. We’re facing persistently high inflation — period.”
March’s report marks the second month in a row that the annual rate of inflation has increased.
The series of recent high reports adds more speculation as to whether inflation is moving towards the Fed’s target of 2 percent, with Fed Chair Jerome Powell saying on April 3 that it was too soon to tell whether recent upticks in inflation were more than temporary fluctuations, indicating that high inflation could be around longer than expected, according to The Hill. The Fed has placed its federal funds rate in a range of 5.25 percent and 5.50 percent in an attempt to bring inflation down to 2 percent year-over-year.
