by Calculated Risk on 5/25/2006 06:05:00 PM

UPDATE: Dr. Altig has a great summary PCE Inflation: Not Horrible, Not Good. His take:

Which means, I think, that everyone walked away from the report believing just about what they believed before the report.

Since I will not be here tomorrow AM, and we are now "data dependent", here is the place to look for the core PCE:

News Release: Personal Income and Outlays. Right now this directs you to the release for March, but it take you to the April report after 8:30 AM ET on May 26th.

Check Table 9 for "PCE excluding food and energy". No matter what you think about reported inflation, this is one of the key numbers for the FED. According to Rex Nutting at MarketWatch, the market expectation is 0.2%.

Economists surveyed by MarketWatch are forecasting a 0.2% increase in core inflation after a 0.3% gain in March.

A higher number will probably mean the FED is leaning towards another rate hike in June.

But even 0.2% has a pretty wide range. If its closer to 0.25% that is about 3% annualized (0.15% is about 1.8% annualized).

You can calculate the actual number using the Chain-type price indexes, also in Table 9. The math is simple: divide April by March and subtract 1. For March, the reported increase was .3%. The actual increase for March was 110.941 divided by 110.586 = 0.32% or 3.9% annualized.

Table 11 presents the annual increase (YoY) of core PCE.

There is one more CPI release (Jun 14, 2006) before the June 28/29 Fed meeting.

Finally, the Dallas Fed provides a slightly different measure: Trimmed-Mean PCE Inflation Rate. This will also be interesting to check (I'm not sure when they will release the data for April - but probably some time on Friday).

Best to all.