US Inflation falls to 3-year low, clearing the way for Fed to begin cutting rates

Wednesday’s report from the Labor Department showed that consumer prices rose just 0.2% from June to July after dropping slightly the previous month for the first time in four years. Measured from a year earlier, prices rose 2.9%, down from 3% in June. It was the mildest year-over-year inflation figure since March 2021.

The ongoing inflation slowdown could affect the presidential campaign, given that former President Donald Trump has highlighted rampant inflation as a key failing of the Biden administration and its energy policies. Vice President Kamala Harris has said she would soon unveil new proposals to “bring down costs and also strengthen the economy overall.”

The government said nearly all of July’s inflation reflected higher rental prices and other housing costs, a trend that, according to real-time data, is easing. As a result, housing costs should rise more slowly in the coming months, contributing to lower inflation.

Austan Goolsbee, president of the Federal Reserve’s Chicago branch, said Wednesday in an interview with The Associated Press that the July data shows that inflation is clearly on track to return to the central bank’s 2% target. He also noted that there are signs that the job market is weakening even while the Fed’s key rate remains at its highest level in decades.Goolsbee’s remarks suggested that he would support a series of rate cuts in the coming months.”If you take the last seven months of last year and now the past several months, they show very strong progress on inflation,” he said. “And the employment side is at least cooling. So I think it is worth our thinking about that quite seriously.”In July, grocery prices rose just 0.1% and are a scant 1.1% higher than they were a year earlier, a much slower pace of growth than in previous years.