By Colby Smith
U.S. inflation rose to 3% in January, strengthening the case for the Federal Reserve to extend a pause on interest rate cuts.
The consumer price index jumped more than expected, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed Wednesday, rising 0.5% from December in what was the fastest monthly increase since August 2023. Last month, the annual pace was 2.9%.
“Core” CPI, which more closely reflects underlying inflation by removing volatile food and energy prices, also showed little improvement. It rose 0.4% from December or 3.3% on a year-over-year basis, both higher than economists expected. The monthly increase in core prices was the highest since April 2023.
The January data underscored the uneven nature of the central bank’s battle against high prices. Inflation has subsided drastically since cresting just above 9% in 2022, but progress in recent months has been much more sporadic.
Austan Goolsbee, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, described the latest inflation report as “sobering.”
Goolsbee, who will cast an official vote on policy decisions this year, said he did not want to read too much into one inflation report, especially since it followed two months of more “encouraging” developments and noted that seasonal quirks were typical in January data. But he made clear that it was an unwelcome development.
“There’s no question, if we got multiple months like this, then the job is clearly not done,” he said in an interview.
Last month, price increases in sectors closely watched by consumers — from groceries to gasoline — offset declines in other categories like clothing and furniture.
Grocery prices climbed 0.5% compared with the previous month, or 1.9% on a yearly basis. That was driven in large part by a nationwide egg shortage caused by an outbreak of bird flu, which has pushed prices up 15.2% over the past four weeks. Since last year, egg prices are up 53%. It was the largest monthly increase in egg prices since June 2015, accounting for roughly two-thirds of the total increase in grocery prices since December.
Gasoline prices also rose another 1.8% over the course of the month, although they are down 0.2% compared with the same time last year. Among other categories to increase were airline fares and hotel rates. Used cars and trucks as well as automobile insurance rose, with prices up about 2% from December. Economists said they do not expect many of those items to continue rising, however, suggesting the January pace may not be sustained.
Economists have closely watched for further improvements in housing-related costs, a slowdown that began to show up in the data at the end of last year. That progress stalled in January, with shelter prices increasing 0.4% over the month, or 4.4% on a year-over-year basis.
Jonathan Wright, a former Fed economist now at Johns Hopkins University, said the latest data “reinforces the picture of inflation getting stuck around 3% and that last percentage point becoming very difficult to achieve,” referring to the Fed’s 2% goal. He said a rate increase from the central bank is “at least as likely” as a rate cut in the near term.
Price pressures are persisting at a time of significant uncertainty about the outlook for the economy just weeks into President Donald Trump’s second term in the White House. Tariffs, deportations, tax cuts and deregulation are expected to have an economic impact, but the final policy mix will determine whether economists and policymakers will pay more mind to the risk of resurgent inflation or an unexpected slowdown in growth.
“The risks are to higher inflation and lower growth,” said Alan Detmeister, a former Fed economist now at UBS, of Trump’s proposals. Much will depend on what is actually carried out, he added, saying the economic outlook is “very uncertain.”
Republicans were quick to cast blame on the Biden administration for the recent rise in prices. Rep. Jason Smith of Missouri, who heads the House Ways and Means Committee, said the former president “failed to lower prices and left behind an inflation mess that President Trump is cleaning up.”
In a social media post after the report was released, Trump himself said, “BIDEN INFLATION UP!” That followed another missive earlier in the day in which he called for interest rates to be lowered, saying it was “something which would go hand in hand with upcoming Tariffs!!!”
But the Fed has signaled little urgency to lower rates for the time being, setting up a potential clash with a president who showed in his first term a readiness to critique the central bank when it resisted his demands for cuts. After a percentage point worth of cuts in the final three months of last year, rates now hover between 4.25% and 4.5%.
Speaking to House lawmakers Wednesday, Fed Chair Jerome Powell referenced the latest inflation data and said it showed that “we’re close, but not there on inflation.”
Powell said that while there has been “great progress” on bringing inflation down, “we’re not quite there yet, so we want to keep policy restrictive.”
Over two days of hearings, which began Tuesday, his main message to lawmakers is that there is no urgency to lower interest rates. Officials at the central bank have in recent weeks suggested that so long as the labor market stays solid, they will need to see more substantive progress in inflation coming down before again pulling their policy lever.
John Williams, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said in a speech Tuesday that he expected progress toward the 2% inflation goal, although he noted that it “will take time before we can achieve that target on a sustained basis.”
After the inflation report, traders in federal funds futures markets scaled back their bets about when the Fed would next lower interest rates, pushing back the timing from September to December. The worse-than-expected data sent U.S. stocks and government bonds tumbling.