Fed’s Daly: US July CPI is a “good data point”

Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco President Mary C. Daly said on Thursday that today’s Consumer Price Index report was “good news” for families and businesses in an interview with Yahoo! Finance. She mentioned that they are committed to getting core inflation down.

The US Dollar Index is falling on Thursday but is off lows. The DXY bottomed after the US CPI report at 101.79 and then rebounded to 102.25.

The consumer price index rose 3.2% from a year ago in July, slightly below expectations. The core CPI ran at a 12-month rate of 4.7%, also below the estimate. Both measures were up 0.2% on the month. Almost all of the monthly inflation increase came from shelter costs, which rose 0.4% and were up 7.7% from a year ago.

Real wages adjusted for inflation increased 0.3% on the month and were up 1.1% from a year ago. While inflation has come well off its 40-year highs of mid-2022, it is still considerably above the 2% level where the Federal Reserve would like it.

“We’re going to be watching supercore carefully, that’s a big component of spending and it hasn’t made much progress so far, we need to see it come back to pre-pandemic levels,” argued Daly.


Regarding the next FOMC meeting, Daly mentioned that there is a lot more information to assess before. “It’s premature to project” if what is needed is more rate hikes or to hold them steady for a longer period. “We are a long way from a conversation about rate cuts”.

“It’s still hard to find workers,” said Daly. According to the the economy is not yet in balance.