Core PPI up 9.6% annualized (0.8% MoM) in May

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ppi.nr0.htm

by JumpCrisscross • 1 month ago

104 122 1 month ago

bls.gov

hilariously• 1 month ago

This is what you get when you elect a mad king. "I love the inflation" - Donald Trump.

gortok• 1 month ago

We are not at a point as a country to have a serious discussion about governance.

The administration in charge (as recently as yesterday) still blames Biden for issues happening on their watch, even though he hasn’t been in officer for 16 months now.

This is not an administration serious about governing, and until we have an administration serious about governing and taking responsibility for their actions, we will continue to have this situation where half the country blames the half not in power for decisions it is making.

Congress of course is somehow worse, as instead of treating the executive like a branch of government they are meant to have oversight of, they abdicate their oversight role and roll over to the wishes of the present administration.

The net effect is those of us that live paycheck to paycheck (which is 2/3rds of Americans) are caught in the middle of a situation that would be deemed fantastical and not realistic to write about if it was described in a dystopian novel.

The Iran war continues with no oversight from Congress, and no authorized war while we pay the price. Vote them all out.

catigula3• 1 month ago

The problem runs deeper than the current administration. Voting doesn't work.

The Biden administration isn't the antidote to our problems.

triceratops13• 1 month ago

Voting doesn't work

Disparaging democracy doesn't work. Saying shit like this is worse than not voting.

EDIT: Downvoted for defending democracy. I do love democracy :-D

win311fwg8• 1 month ago

Voting doesn't work.

It works fine to accomplish what it is intended to do: Pick a worker to hire.

The problem is that many assume it ends there and the employee will magically go off and do great things. That is not how it works. If you've ever worked with employees before, you'll know full well that you have to regularly communicate with them to keep them on track. Even if the most stellar employee in the world trying to do everything right will never be a mind reader.

When was the last time you spoke to the person you hired for the job of representative? I expect for most reading this, the answer will be never. That is what doesn't work.

SoftTalker• 1 month ago

The problem as I see it is more about a real habit of blaming the other side and keeping problems alive as wedge issues than actually solving anything. This was a problem before, and always has been to some extent, but seems to have gotten much worse since social media and twitter became ways for memes to spread virally. So much easier to get outraged about something the other guy is or is not doing, than to do the work to come up with any solutions. And the country is pretty evenly divided on which side they like, so we're just treading water in sewage mostly.

wat100002• 1 month ago

Voting works fine, people just don't do it very much.

People complain about their choices. Meanwhile, there's atrocious turnout in the primaries which determine those choices.

timacles3• 1 month ago

The politics in this country have been intentionally broken going back to Clinton and Obama. It is impossible to make meaningful change anymore.

Add in the propaganda convincing 2/5th of the country to consistently vote against their own interests and fundamentally misunderstand core issues, and it is difficult to see what can be done in the next 10 years.

The USA has had a hostile takeover by oligarchs. We are a country who serves only corporations and those who own them. Regular people have been almost completely removed from the process

JumpCrisscross13• 1 month ago

We are a country who serves only corporations and those who own them. Regular people have been almost completely removed from the process

Regular people removed themselves when we chose cultural flashpoints over material wealth.

p-o• 1 month ago

It's interesting how you elect to name two presidents in an era that were democrats while conveniently omitting the republican president in between. With all his baggages, I find this quite convenient.

khriss2• 1 month ago

The politics in this country have been intentionally broken going back to Clinton and Obama.

Ahh yes, the presidents from the other party, including the one currently in office, who runs arguably the most brazenly corrupt administrations in US history, having tripled his family's net worth in a single year is of course entirely blame free /s.

lossolo• 1 month ago

Seems like free speech didn't help Americans avoid becoming economic slaves.

psadauskas2• 1 month ago

This didn't start with Clinton or Obama (interesting you skipped over a much larger contributor). As usual, "Reagan made everything worse".

When he was governor of California, he ended free college tuition for the UC state schools, because some hippies at Berkley were protesting the Vietnam war.

When he was campaigning for president, he popularized the idea of the "welfare queen", and got poor white people to vote against their own interests because there were some hypothetical single black mothers abusing the system.

When he got into office, he cut taxes, mostly for the wealthy, but also a bit for the middle class. He expected that he could use that as an excuse to then cut social programs to keep the budget reasonably balanced, but once people have benefits they don't want to give them up. He was forced to not go through with the cuts, doubling the federal budget deficit, and kicking off the trend of deficit spending (except for a brief period under Clinton in the late 90s that W then squandered in Iraq and Afghanistan).

Reagan also perfected the process of:

1. Complain that government programs are bad or inefficient. 2. Use it as an excuse to cut their funding. 3. Government programs get worse as a result. 4. Goto 1.

He didn't start any of these trends, but he did ramp them way up, and we've been on that trajectory ever since.

miltonlost• 1 month ago

Vote out the Republican fascists actually abdicating responsibility. Dems can't do anything when they don't control legislature. Don't end up bothsidesing the last sentene when the rest of your comment is about the iffectualness of Trump and Republicans

UncleMeat3• 1 month ago

Trump blames Biden for January 6th. When, you know, Trump was president and Biden had not yet assumed office. Dude is simply constitutionally incapable of being a serious person.

duskdozer• 1 month ago

So, how many are getting paycuts this year? Things aren't/haven't ever been suited for me to be a job hopper, and as always that seems to be the only way to have your salary meaningfully keep up with inflation.

justonepost2• 1 month ago

Can't wait for AI to bring the prices of all goods to near zero :)

steveBK1232• 1 month ago

This is what worries me about the AI productivity boom vs previous tech/industrial productivity booms..

We've already made most consumer goods cheap.

The goods/services that are more inflation tied - food, transport, medicine, housing, and education.. are those tethered tied to physical world where costs are driven by energy, regulatory issues, and skilled domestic labor.

schnitzelstoat2• 1 month ago

Unless it brings the price of labour to near zero.

3askhg• 1 month ago

Until the press and the public do not examine the real long term strategies of the US establishment, this won't change.

All you hear is reporting about Trump's daily contradictory statements, "leaks" in Axios that peace in Iran is imminent, then 40 tomahawk missiles. Next are probably fake peace talks again.

Until the press grasps that the US establishment wants a protracted forever war that hurts the EU, Japan, and India, no change will occur. The US wants to force investment of these countries in building valuable industrial infrastructure in the US and shake them down with high US energy imports.

The US population is suffering collateral damage. The billionaires are willing to take that sacrifice.

JumpCrisscross13• 1 month ago

the US establishment wants a protracted forever war that hurts the EU, Japan, and India, no change will occur

This presumes way more competence at the top than we’ve got.

US wants to force investment of these countries in building valuable industrial infrastructure in the US and shake them down with high US energy imports

Americans want lots of things. Current policy isn’t promoting those interests. Currently, the war in Iran is causing long-term demand destruction for the sort of energy products America exports among our allies.

w3qkjh• 1 month ago

This presumes way more competence at the top than we’ve got.

That is the intended perception because the public figures are imbeciles. The people in the background are highly competent and controlling energy flows to US "allies" has been a priority issue since Reagan blew up a Soviet pipeline to Germany.

Or make the starting point the Suez Crisis when the US unseated Britain in the Middle East and took over.

martythemaniak• 1 month ago

There are no long term strategies, neither the "establishment" nor the public (ie you) seem to grasp that simple fact.

Americans simply do not wish to engage with reality any more, and that's why they're perfectly happy to elect a TV personality for a president who filled his cabinet with TV personalities who can do nothing more than LARP as statesmen.

I think your comment is another instance of this LARP, where the public can't tell the difference between reality and TV.

alberth• 1 month ago

CPI vs PPI, in case you’re curious like me …

CPI tracks retail costs and the cost of living, whereas PPI tracks wholesale costs. As such, PPI acts as an early indicator of future consumer inflation.

JumpCrisscross13• 1 month ago

More precisely, CPI tracks what you buy. Even if it’s imported. PPI tracks what’s produced here, even if for export.

There is a fun Canadian paper on how they started intensely decoupling after 2001, alongside the rise of global multi-step supply chains [1].

[1] https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/261258/1/swp2022-05....

sph• 1 month ago

Even more precisely, CPI tracks what someone has decided the average person would buy, and its basket of products is often tweaked to present more palatable numbers; it makes comparison of prices and inflation across years pretty much impossible.

The real inflation value a person experiences is often much greater than the cooked CPI figures.

calvinmorrison• 1 month ago

though I am seeing ( work with distributors ) a lot less reluctance to raise prices or adjust. It took a while but many of my customers can now more easily reprice their catalog and customers getting used to it, so maybe its less of a lag as before

revel• 1 month ago

Awful news for everybody, particularly those in speculative tech jobs.

We may well look back at the attack on Iran as the American tipping point that caused the same kind of financial stagnation as Brexit caused for the UK.

schnitzelstoat2• 1 month ago

It's crazy that now the main goal of the war is to open a strait that was already open before the war.

Henchman21• 1 month ago

The main goal was to destroy the US. Its so painfully obvious that you really have to be deep into whatever you’re into to not see it.

steveBK1232• 1 month ago

Possible the everything bubble propping up unprofitable tech buying up resources across the supply chain to build infrastructure + tariff inflation + war of choice energy inflation + massive federal spending + unwillingness to hike rates to cool things off ?

Good chance we run the COVID inflation all over again

khriss2• 1 month ago

What makes this appalling is that the current situation is entirely the result of deliberate choice by the president.

I know there will be a lot of commenters rushing in to breathlessly claim 'Inflation was worse under Biden!'. However, there is a difference between inflation being the result of a literal 'once a 100 year' global pandemic and Trump deciding to attack Iran because he needed to remove attention from his involvement in the Epstein files.

As a summary

* Jan 2025 - Inflation when Trump took office was 2.9%

* Jan 2026 - Inflation at 2.4%

* 30th Jan 2026 - DOJ releases the first major batch (3 million files) of Epstein files. Numerous mention of Donald Trump in the files are immediately highlighted. Trump rants and rails, calling it a 'witch hunt'

* Feb 2026 - New York times releases a bombshell report documenting that Trump appeared in the files 5300 times. [1]

* Mid Feb 2026 - Trump starts ratcheting up the rhetoric against Iran

* 28th Feb 2026 - US attacks Iran

* June 2026 - Avg gas prices over $4, US CPI at 4.2% and rising rapidly. The PPI numbers in the article referenced by OP show that this is only going to get worse.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/01/us/trump-epstein-files.ht...

j_w• 1 month ago

And this doesn't even include tariffs...

pixelatedindex3• 1 month ago

The fact that he could kidnap Maduro probably gave him false confidence that waltzing into Iran might work out. Alas, for us.

Gud• 1 month ago

It was clear the “plan” was take control of Venezuelan oil, Iranian oil, and make Cuba a resort paradise for the rich American upper class, like God intended.

danaris• 1 month ago

From what I understand, there's a very good chance that Venezuelan forces of some kind collaborated on that—possibly to the point of delivering Maduro gift-wrapped.

UncleMeat3• 1 month ago

A literal toddler for president. Swings his dick around and manages to fuck up global supply chains. Now he is back online talking about invading Iran and taking all of its oil infrastructure.

rsync• 1 month ago

No. A figurative toddler.

A literal toddler would be one to two years old.

I have five figures of karma with which to fight this battle.

deltoidmaximus• 1 month ago

And IIRC tons of FBI employees combed over the files in 2025 likely to remove Trump or Trump and allies at the cost of millions of dollars. And even after that he's still all over them so imagine what was in there originally.

psadauskas2• 1 month ago

the current situation is entirely the result of deliberate choice by the president.

A choice that was given to at least 5 presidents before him, and they all recognized how stupid it would be. This president, though, is so infatuated with people he thinks are powerful, that he'll do anything they say, hoping they'll consider him to be one of them.

applicative• 1 month ago

* Jan 8 2026 Iran begins the longest internet blackout in universal world history due to massive protests over economic issues.

howmayiannoyyou• 1 month ago

Yes, purchasing power of USD declines with inflation.

No, that doesn't mean over a long enough time horizon what most people think it means.

USD has declined significantly since 2017 (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SA0R), but what it buys has substantively changed.

- You couldn't buy continous glucose monitors, OTC hearing aids, home heart monitors using your cellphone or watch or countless medications that didn't exist in 2017 (eg. Journavx, the first non-opiod pain med, smart insulin pens, etc.).

- You couldn't buy noise-cancelling earbuds, generative AI, somewhat affordable electric vehicles, PT and medical advice from Youtube/AI, self driving vehicles, more reliable electricity from grid-scale store, Satellite rescue from your cellphone, etc.

The retort will be daily items are about 30% more expensive since Covid. This is the result of Federal and State policies that have little to do with the White House and everything to do with Congress and State Houses. As just one example... ask yourself why so much ag is grown in Western states with water shortages and so far from the rest of the country?

sunir• 1 month ago

It says exactly what it says, which is that energy prices are higher. You can read the report.

post-it• 1 month ago

ask yourself why so much ag is grown in Western states with water shortages and so far from the rest of the country?

Because water is one of the cheapest inputs into agriculture. Growing almonds in California is a ~bad idea, but it's not a stupid idea.

SubiculumCode• 1 month ago

California has 4 seasons of growing weather, good soil, and conditions that help against rot. The lack of water is exactly why it's good for growing stuff, if you can get the water. Excess water ruins crops all the time.

adjejmxbdjdn2• 1 month ago

This comment that seems determined to state its conclusion without providing any evidence other than “why is so much agriculture in parts of the country that are conducive to agriculture”.

adjejmxbdjdn2• 1 month ago

We have voluntarily recreated the effects of the worst supply side disruption in modern history that happened after the pandemic.

Core PPI up 9.6% annualized (0.8% MoM) in May

Related Stories