Consumer price gains are beginning to cool off slightly, data due on Tuesday should show — but they are probably still climbing quickly enough to keep pressure on the White House and Federal Reserve.
Prices for goods and services including airline tickets and hotel rooms probably increased more slowly in August, helping overall inflation to slow from its recent breakneck pace. Inflation most likely climbed by 5.3 percent in the year through August, according to expectations from economists surveyed by Bloomberg for the closely watched Consumer Price Index. The data will be released at 8:30 a.m. Monthly gains were expected to slow to 0.4 percent in August compared with 0.5 percent in July, making for the slowest pace of increase since February.
Consumer price inflation has been running hot this year as the economy reopens from the pandemic, causing prices for dinners out and office clothes to bounce back. At the same time, supply chain snarls have pushed shipping costs higher, feeding into prices for manufactured goods. Labor costs have climbed in some industries, pushing inflation higher around the edges, and rent prices are rising again as workers return to cities after fleeing in 2020.
That confluence of factors has created an inflationary burst that officials at the Fed and the White House expect — and hope — will prove temporary. Policymakers are betting that annual price gains will settle down toward the central bank’s 2 percent average target over time, as virus-related quirks work their way through the system.
The Fed defines its target using a different index, the Personal Consumption Expenditures measure. That gauge has also picked up this year, but by less than the C.P.I., climbing by 4.2 percent in the year through July.
Prices could remain higher for longer than economists anticipate, though, and in light of that risk policymakers are eagerly watching for any hint that moderation is underway. They would take heart in any cool-down, but even the slower pace of monthly growth — assuming it comes in at 0.4 percent as expected — would still produce a 4.9 percent pace of annual inflation if it continued for 12 months.
Officials will need to see it moderate by more than that before they can be comfortable with the rate of inflation.
Central bankers are hoping that inflation will fade before consumers come to expect persistently higher prices — which can become a self-fulfilling prophecy as shoppers accept loftier price tags and also demand higher pay. A closely watched tracker of households’ outlook for inflation, released by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on Monday, showed that expectations rocketed up to 5.2 percent in the short term and 4 percent in the medium term.
That data point is disquieting, but it comes in contrast to inflation expectations in financial markets, which have been relatively stable after moving up earlier this year. And real-world prices may begin to ease in important categories in the months ahead.
Used car prices, which have been a big cause of inflation this year, should now be beginning to ease, helping to cool off the month-over-month increases. Airfares and hotel room rates might also pull back in the latest data because increasing virus cases kept some travelers at home.
But other price pressures may persist.
“We expect upward pressure from supply chain bottlenecks and wage pressures to boost prices of new cars, household furnishings, and recreation and personal care products and services in this week’s report,” Goldman Sachs economists wrote in a preview note.
Omair Sharif, founder and president of the research firm Inflation Insights, said he would be watching the interplay between the pandemic-affected categories that policymakers have been pointing to as a reason to expect inflation to slow and those that could fuel a more lasting price pickup, like rent costs.
“Will the Fed be vindicated in their view that a lot of this is transitory?” Mr. Sharif said. “The other thing I’m looking at: Are the stickier indexes starting to pick up steam?”
Job vacancies in Britain climbed to a record in August, rising above one million for the first time, as the labor market continued its uneven recovery, according to data released Tuesday by the Office for National Statistics.
As Britain emerged from lockdowns, the demand for workers has soared. Every sector is seeking more workers, with restaurants, bars, hotels and other accommodation and food businesses trying to hire the most over the summer.
It has helped push the unemployment rate down, to 4.6 percent, and has shrunk the number of people who are out of the work force.
Nearly a quarter of a million people were added to company payrolls in August, returning this part of the labor market (which doesn’t include the self-employed) to its prepandemic size, the statistics office said. But not every region had fully recovered. The number of employees was still down in London, in southeast England and in Scotland. And some of the workers on payroll were still receiving wage subsidies from the government’s furlough program.
The soaring vacancy rate has highlighted mismatches in the labor market. Even as people return to work, lots of businesses report they are struggling to hire. The staff they are looking for have either moved into different industries or left the country. And job seekers don’t have the right training or experience. Growth in the manufacturing sector has been hampered by the challenge of filling open positions. And businesses across Britain are running low on supplies because there are too few truck drivers.
Analysts predict that some of the gains in the labor market will be reversed when the furlough program ends this month, and employers can no longer rely on the government to top up staff wages up to 80 percent for the hours they don’t work. At the end of July, there were 484,000 employers with 1.6 million workers still on furlough. Layoffs are expected; a group representing the travel sector said more than two-thirds of businesses with staff on furlough expect to cut jobs when the program ends.
“With the furlough scheme ending in little over two weeks’ time, we should expect a fresh rise in unemployment this autumn, particularly among furloughed staff that aren’t able to return to their previous jobs,” Nye Cominetti, an economist at the Resolution Foundation, a think tank studying living standards, wrote in a note.
Samuel Tombs, an economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, said the end of the furlough program would increase unemployment and underemployment, as people can’t find as much work as they would like, despite the high number of vacancies.
“About 60 percent of staff on furlough are attached to small businesses employing fewer than 20 people, who are unlikely to have the financial strength to re-employ them for all their pre-Covid hours,” he wrote in a note to clients. Businesses with high vacancies are different from the ones using the furlough program, so people will need to retrain before they return to employment, he added, predicting that the unemployment rate would to rise to 5 percent later this year.
It’s that time of the year again, when Apple unveils its latest gadgets ahead of the holiday season.
On Tuesday, the iPhone maker will hold its annual product event — virtually, because of the coronavirus pandemic — and present its newest lineup. The new products — including iPhones and Apple Watch — will have a strong focus on screens, in an era when people are increasingly glued to them.
The company plans to broadcast a video presentation starting at 10 a.m. Pacific time to show new iPhones with improved displays and Apple Watches with slightly larger screens, according to people briefed on the event, who were not authorized to speak publicly about the products. Apple declined to comment.
The aesthetic of the new iPhones will closely resemble that of last year’s models, the people said. The biggest change will be to the screen, which will have what is known as a higher “refresh rate” that will make videos and motion look smoother. The camera will also be improved, the people said.
The new Apple Watch will also look similar to last year’s models but will include slightly larger displays that can show more pixels, the people briefed on the products said. That will make images and text shown on the watch face look more compelling.
Apple issued emergency software updates on Monday after security researchers uncovered a flaw that allows highly invasive spyware to infect anyone’s iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch or Mac computer without so much as a click.
Apple has urged customers to run the latest software updates for the fixes to take effect, by installing iOS 14.8, MacOS 11.6 and WatchOS 7.6.2.
Nicole PerlrothReporting from Silicon Valley
How to Fix Your iPhone’s Security Flaw 📱
Nicole PerlrothReporting from Silicon Valley
Apple issued a software update on Monday to fix a critical flaw in its products that had allowed governments to invisibly spy on Apple users without so much as a click.
Here’s how to update your iPhone with the software patch →
“This spyware can do everything an iPhone user can do on their device and more.” READ MORE →
