Consumer Economy
- Producer Prices (PPIACO) 292.5 +9.80 (+3.47% m/m)
- Existing Home Sales (EXHOSLUSM495S) 4.17M +130.0K (+3.22% m/m)
- CPI All Urban (CPIAUCSL) +0.47% m/m
The old style (“just commodities”) PPI (PPIACO) jumped 3.47% m/m, or about 42% annualized.
Table here: (FRED)
Cherry-picked % change m/m (via grok):
- Petroleum products, refined: +21.25%
- Fuels and related products: +10.82%
- Industrial Chemicals: +7.69%
- Industrial Commodities: +3.92
- Chemicals: +4.56%
- Farm products: +3.66%
What could possibly go wrong?
Existing home sales moved off the lows, a modest improvement.
CPI came in at 0.47% m/m, which is 5.64% annualized. Actual, un-rigged (pre-1983-calculated) inflation is probably more like 12-13%.
More details at the BLS release here.
Cherry-picked BLS data; BLS provides m/m values for us.
- Gasoline : +8.6%
- Airline Fares: +6.9%
- Used Cars/Trucks: +1.5%
- Electricity: +1.0%
- Vaxxident Repair: +0.8%
- Hospital Services: +0.7%
Wolf has lots of charts.
(source – wolfstreet)
For those of us seeing “drivers doing crazy things,” – maybe that’s why auto repair inflation remains high. There’s a reason I call it “vaxxident repair”… the shots made some of us crazy.
Credit & Rates
- Total Bank Credit (TOTBKCR) 19.57T -16.2B (-0.08% w/w)
- Fed Balance Sheet (WALCL) 6.73T +13.9B (+0.21% w/w)
- US 30 Year Mortgage Rate (MORTGAGE30US) 6.52% +4 bp
- 3-Month Treasury (DGS3MO) 3.71% -7 bp
- 1-Year Treasury (DGS1) 3.86% -2 bp
- 10-Year Treasury (DGS10) 4.49% -6 bp
- 20+ Treasury ETF (TLT.N) +0.83% w/w
Bank Credit shrank this week, but it remains overall expansionary (over 5%) in the longer term. Contrast vs Senile Joe 2023, which saw a massive contraction – and probably should have been a recession. I suspect most of the recent (2025, 2026) credit growth was about AI.
The Fed engaged in money printing this week – $13.9 billion. That said, over the past 4 weeks, total printing has been “mostly none.” Here is the net change w/w since 2020; you can spot the printy periods all on your own.
Rates dropped this week; there were flows into the short end [1m-3m] and the long end [5y-30y]. Rates dropping = money flowing into those instruments. This is not an inflation signal.
Here’s a daily chart of TLT – which saw a decent gain [+0.83%]. You can see the bulk of the TLT move happened on
by desert-survivor 
