There was no shortage of hype around Friday’s annual CPI revisions from the BLS.

For once, you can’t blame the excitable media. Fed officials, among them Jerome Powell and Chris Waller, flagged the revisions as potentially pivotal for the trajectory of monetary policy as the Committee ponders when to commence so-called “insurance cuts.”

Long story short, there was some concern that the update might suggest recent disinflation progress was illusory. Those worries stemmed from last year’s revisions, which cast considerable doubt on the notion that 2022’s aggressive rate hikes were sufficient to put inflation on a sustainable path back to the Fed’s target.

Waller called those revisions to mind in remarks delivered a few weeks ago. “Recall that a year ago, when it looked like inflation was coming down quickly, the annual update to the seasonal factors erased those gains,” he said on January 16, during a Brookings address.

I won’t bury the lede any more than I already have: The revisions were a nonevent. So much so, in fact, that it’s hardly worth drawing a picture. But I’ll draw you one anyway.

That’s the three-month annualized rate for core price growth. It was unchanged at 3.3% in Q4. December’s MoM reading on headline CPI was revised down to 0.2% from 0.3%.

Part of me (the part that likes to hear myself talk) wishes there were more to say about the last of this week’s macro inputs, but this was inescapably a “nothing to see here” release. And that’s exactly what policymakers were hoping for. Just about the last thing the Fed needed after what some criticized as a premature dovish pivot late last year was evidence to suggest inflation hadn’t moderated as much, or as durably, as officials were led by statisticians to believe.

The market-implied odds of a rate cut next month shouldn’t shift based on the revisions. Those odds were trimmed from around 80% at the extremes to just ~one-in-five now. Notwithstanding all kinds of pushback from Fedspeakers, there are simply too many top-tier data releases between now and next month’s policy gathering for traders to completely price out the March FOMC meeting, particularly given renewed drama at some regional banks.

With revisions to last year’s numbers out of the way, market focus will shift to the first of 2024’s CPI readings, due next week.