US CPI/PPI - 2025-10-23

A nice beat, but the narrative will nevertheless be that inflation is still too "sticky." The worst contributor was gasoline, explaining more than a third of September's total headline inflation. Odd, with oil prices lower? No... refinery capacity is emerging as a new bottleneck, as we wrote earlier this week. Don't blame AI -- electricity was the single most deflationary category in September. Not enough to offset gasoline, not by a long shot. So overall, that makes goods inflation look worse this month than services inflation, and that will support the narrative that tariffs are proving to be inflationary. Sorry. The gasoline inflation is due to the prior president's stupid policies, not the current president's stupid policies.