On a day when a surprise rate hike from the Bank of Canada (amplified by the previous day’s RBA hike) served notice that central banks are willing to push the envelope further in the event price pressures refuse to abate, it’s perhaps worth highlighting some good news on the inflation front.

Used vehicle prices in the US notched a second consecutive monthly decline in May, the latest read on the Manheim gauge showed.

This remains a meaningful (if not mission critical) piece of the disinflation puzzle for the Fed. Policymakers still need all the help they can get. The MoM decline was 2.7%.

“Price erosion continued in May,” Chris Frey, senior manager of economic and industry insights for Cox Automotive, said Wednesday.

Frey cautioned that two months doesn’t make a trend, and noted that the YoY declines “might slow over the next several months as we encounter the lower prices seen at auction from May through November last year.”

Whatever the case, the Manheim prints generally lead the official inflation data, so the reported declines were welcome at the Fed, even as falling used vehicle prices are problematic for buyers forced into poor decisions during the pandemic. The 7.6% YoY drop was the ninth straight 12-month decrease.

Meanwhile, the latest update on the UN’s FAO index found the gauge resuming its decline from the war-driven spike following a small uptick in April. May’s drop came courtesy of moderating prices for vegetable oil, cereals and dairy.

The gauge of global food prices, which garnered all manner of media attention during the earliest days of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, now sits at the lowest since April of 2021.

Of course, “low” is relative. As the chart shows, the index is still very elevated from a historical perspective, and it’s vulnerable to any additional deterioration in the conflict — like, say, mass flooding.

Finally, data from Indeed’s “Hiring Lab” suggested advertised US wage growth in May was just 5.3%, four full percentage points lower than the January 2022 highs. Indeed suggested that if the current rate of deceleration persists, wage growth should return to the pre-pandemic average of 3.1% later this year or early next. 3.5% is generally seen as consistent with on-target inflation.

“If the slowdown happens at the more rapid pace of the unsmoothed data, posted wage growth will reach the 3.1% historic rate as soon as November,” an update published Wednesday said.

Earlier this week, Goldman’s Jan Hatzius expressed confidence that wage growth is on its way back to sustainable levels, consistent with a soft landing.

The bank’s sequential wage tracker is still trending lower and Goldman’s “preferred” measures of labor market balance have all reversed “significantly more than half” of their respective pandemic overshoots.

Still, Hatzius said, those measures “have some way to go” before they’re consistent with 2% inflation.