It’s PCE Price Index Week
That’s the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge.
This week’s big piece of the “what will the Fed do and when will it do it” conundrum won’t come until Friday at 8:30 a.m. ET, when the Bureau of Economic Analysis releases Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index data for February.But we might want to pay attention to what Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta President Raphael Bostic has to say this morning.
Bostic will join Gary Painter, the real estate program director at the Carl H. Lindner College of Business, for a moderated conversation at the University of Cincinnati Real Estate Center's March Roundtable.
On Friday, Bostic told reporters that he projects just one rate cut in 2024 and that it may happen later in the year than he previously expected. The Atlanta Fed president had forecast one cut this summer and one more to follow before year’s end.
“We will have to see how the data come in over the next several weeks,” Bostic said, noting “troubling things” under the headlines, including the number of items in the consumer basket rising at an elevated rate.
The PCE for January was up 0.3 percent from December. Food prices were up 0.5 percent, and energy prices were down 1.4 percent. Excluding food and energy, the PCE rose 0.4 percent.
The PCE was up 2.4 percent year over year in January, with prices for services up 3.9 percent and prices for goods down 0.5 percent. Food prices were up 1.4 percent, and energy prices were down 4.9 percent.
Excluding food and energy, the PCE was down 2.8 percent from a year ago in January.
Fed Chair Jerome Powell is also speaking on Good Friday, at 11:30 a.m. ET.
In between, we’ll get home sales and home price and consumer confidence and jobless claims data as well as the second read on fourth-quarter gross domestic product.
But this is a consumption-driven economy. And, as Bostic suggested on Friday and will probably reiterate today, it’s all about that core PCE reading.
Welcome to the first day of the last week of the first quarter.