Tamer Inflation in April Revives Hopes for Interest-Rate Cut

If your budget is squeezed by high borrowing costs for mortgages, credit cards and other loans, a relatively tame inflation report that came out on Friday could be the first step on the road to relief.

Friday’s data on Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) from the Bureau of Economic Analysis could please officials at the Federal Reserve after a streak of hotter-than-expected inflation reports at the outset of the year suggested the fight against rapidly rising prices was taking a turn for the worse. 

Echoing another inflation measure released earlier this month, the PCE price index showed inflation rose 2.7% over the year in April, in line with expectations and unchanged since March. The annual number is still well above the 2% annual rate that the Fed is aiming for, but the lack of movement stifled fears that inflation has reignited.

Of special note to Fed-watchers, the report showed “core” inflation increasing 0.2% over the month, easing from a 0.3% rate the month before. Fed officials pay close attention to core inflation since it excludes volatile prices for food and energy and serves as an indicator of longer-term inflation trends.

Fed Will Need More Evidence of Cooling Inflation

The central bank is aiming to tamp down inflation by keeping borrowing costs high for all kinds of loans, discouraging spending and allowing supply and demand to rebalance. Fed officials in recent weeks have said they’ll keep it at its current level, a 23-year high, for as long as it takes to quell inflation.

By itself, one inflation report is unlikely to be enough to convince the Fed that inflation is beaten and they can safely lower the benchmark fed funds rate, economists said. A string of similarly cool inflation reports over the summer, however, could set the stage for a rate cut later in the year, several economists said. 

“Although further progress is likely needed before the Fed is comfortable easing policy, the April data largely make the hot inflation data at the start of the year look more like a blip rather than renewed acceleration in price growth,”  Tim Quinlan and Shannon Seery Grein, economists at Wells Fargo Securities, said in a commentary. “This inflation data combined with the softening in overall spending suggests the door is still open for potential Fed easing later this year, though it will need to see further progress on inflation before rate cuts are truly in play.”

The report made an earlier rate cut seem more likely, at least to traders. Markets were pricing in a 53.2% chance of a September rate cut in the wake of the report Friday morning, up from 50.5% the day before, according to the CME Group’s FedWatch tool, which forecasts rate movements based on fed fund futures trading data.