By Lucia Mutikani<\/p>\n
WASHINGTON, Feb 13 (Reuters) – U.S. consumer prices increased less than expected in January, but underlying inflation firmed as businesses raised prices at the start of the \u200cyear, which together with a stabilizing labor market could allow the Federal Reserve to \u200ckeep interest rates unchanged for a while.<\/p>\n
The Consumer Price Index rose 0.2% last month after an unrevised 0.3% gain in \u200bDecember, the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics said on Friday. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast the CPI increasing 0.3%.<\/p>\n
With January’s CPI report, the BLS published recalculated seasonal adjustment factors to reflect 2025 price movements.<\/p>\n
The report was slightly delayed by last week’s three-day shutdown of the federal government. A longer \u200cshutdown last year prevented the collection \u2060of prices for October, causing volatility in the CPI data. Economists expected the volatility faded in January’s report.<\/p>\n
In the 12 months through January, the CPI increased \u20602.4%. The slowdown in the year-on-year inflation rate from 2.7% in December mostly reflected last year’s higher readings dropping out of the calculation.<\/p>\n
The U.S. central bank tracks the Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Indexes for its \u200b2% \u200binflation target. Both measures are running well above target. \u200bThe government reported this week that job \u200cgrowth accelerated in January and the unemployment rate fell to 4.3% from 4.4% in December.<\/p>\n
The Fed last month left its benchmark overnight interest rate in the 3.50%-3.75% range.<\/p>\n
Excluding the volatile food and energy components, the CPI increased 0.3% after rising by an unrevised 0.2% in December.<\/p>\n
Core CPI numbers have overshot expectations every January, with economists saying the seasonal adjustment factors, the model used by the \u200cBLS to strip out seasonal fluctuations from the data, were \u200bnot fully accounting for the one-off turn-of-the-year price increases.<\/p>\n
Last \u200bmonth’s increase likely reflected the one-off turn-of-the-year price \u200bhikes as well as the tariff pass-through from President Donald Trump’s broad tariffs. \u200cIn the 12 months through January, the \u200bso-called core CPI increased 2.5% \u200bafter advancing 2.6% in December. That also reflected last year’s higher readings dropping out of the calculation.<\/p>\n
Economists expect inflation to pick up for a while this year, citing the \u200bpass through from import duties as \u200cwell as the dollar’s depreciation last year against the currencies of the United States’ \u200bmain trade partners. The trade-weighted U.S. dollar fell about 7.4% last year.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Lucia \u200bMutikani; Editing by Andrea Ricci and Chizu Nomiyama)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Lucia Mutikani WASHINGTON, Feb 13 (Reuters) – U.S. consumer prices increased less than expected in January, but…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":473367,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[45,49,48,43558,46,2071,192424,192423],"class_list":["post-473366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-consumer-prices","tag-economy","tag-federal-reserve","tag-labor-department39s-bureau-of-labor-statistics","tag-seasonal-adjustment-factors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=473366"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473366\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/473367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=473366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=473366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=473366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}