White House: There’s Trend of CPI and Prices ‘Growing More Slowly’

On Wednesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Katy Tur Reports,” White House Council of Economic Advisers Chair Jared Bernstein stated that we have seen a trend of “CPI growing more slowly” and the growth in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) is less than it was a year ago.

Bernstein said, “I’m not going to get into granular comments on Federal Reserve policy regarding interest rates. I think the figure you showed earlier shows a very consistent trend in CPI growing more slowly, so it’s down by more than half from where it peaked a year ago. By the way, the Producer Price Index came out this morning. That’s actually been negative three out of the past four months. And the reason I raise that — it’s kind of arcane and in the weeds — but at a time like this, it means that input prices, intermediate prices, the prices that go into production versus consumer spending have been easing, so that probably would continue to put some downward pressure on prices and continue that favorable trend you showed. One other point on housing, we do think that one area where Federal Reserve interest rate hikes really [show] up quite quickly is in dampening demand in the housing sector. And there, we expect in the second half of this year, housing prices to start eas[ing] as well. They get a pretty hefty weight in the price index, so that should also help the trend.”

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