WASHINGTON, Jan 30 (Reuters) – U.S. producer prices increased more than expected in December, with businesses appearing to pass on \u200bhigher costs from import tariffs, suggesting inflation could pick up \u200cin the months ahead.<\/p>\n
The Producer Price Index for final demand surged 0.5% last \u200cmonth after an unrevised 0.2% gain in November, the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics said on Friday. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast the PPI climbing 0.2%.<\/p>\n
In the 12 months through December, the PPI \u2060increased 3.0% after rising \u200cby the same margin in November.<\/p>\n
The BLS is now caught up on the PPI and Consumer Price \u200dIndex releases that were delayed by the 43-day shutdown of the federal government. U.S. Senate Republicans and Democrats were on Friday racing to avoid another \u200bshutdown at midnight, which would delay data releases from the BLS, \u200cincluding January’s employment report due next Friday.<\/p>\n
Last month’s larger-than-expected rise in producer prices was lead by a 0.7% increase in services. A 1.7% jump in margins for final demand trade services, which measures changes in margins received by wholesalers and retailers, accounted for two-thirds \u2060of the increase in services.<\/p>\n
Businesses had \u200bbeen absorbing some of President Donald Trump’s \u200bsweeping import tariffs, preventing a sharp increase in inflation. The Federal Reserve on Wednesday left its benchmark overnight \u200dinterest rate in \u2060the 3.50%-3.75% range. Fed Chair Jerome Powell attributed the overshoot in inflation to tariffs, adding “but there’s an expectation that sometime in \u2060the middle quarters of the year we’ll see tariff inflation topping out.”<\/p>\n
Producer goods \u200cprices were unchanged in December.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Lucia Mutikani; Editing \u200cby Chizu Nomiyama and Andrea Ricci)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON, Jan 30 (Reuters) – U.S. producer prices increased more than expected in December, with businesses appearing to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":439307,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[28,11529,101,36677,2402,31976,638,161502],"class_list":["post-439306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-consumer-price-index","tag-economy","tag-import-tariffs","tag-inflation","tag-ppi","tag-producer-price-index","tag-producer-prices"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=439306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439306\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/439307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=439306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=439306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=439306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}