Producer Price Index (PPI) numbers for February — the sister...

Producer Price Index (PPI) numbers for February — the sister report to yesterday’s important Consumer Price Index (CPI) — swung to a negative -0.1% from an expected +0.3% and originally posted +0.7% the previous quarter. Core PPI (stripping out volatile food and gas costs) was unchanged month over month, down from the +0.4% expected and +0.6% reported for January. Ex-food, energy and trade, this figure swings to +0.2%, but also down from the estimated +0.3%.
Year-over-year PPI slid 80 basis points (bps) from expectations to +4.6%, and down more than a full percentage point from the previous month’s downwardly revised +5.7%. This is perhaps the most pronounced of today’s anti-inflationary data points, although the core PPI read year over year came in at +4.4%, 10 bps lower than expected. That said, we’re now less than half the cycle high +9.7%; +4.4% is the lowest print we’ve seen since March of 2021.
Retail Sales for February came in as expected: -0.4%, a big swing down from the January outlier +3.0%. (December’s Retail Sales reached -1.1%, so we’re going through a turbulent period over the past few months.) Ex-autos, we’re at -0.1%, down from the unched (unchanged) read analysts were anticipating. Ex-autos and gas, we came in unched, higher than expectations for -0.2%. A month ago — again, the post-holiday season outlier month — we saw +2.3% ex-autos and +2.8% ex-autos and gas. The Control read was an even stouter +0.5%, down from +2.3% previously.