Inflation Test Looms As Stocks Ask, ‘Who Needs Rate Cuts, Anyway?’

The schedule's pretty crowded this week in the US. An update on the Fed's preferred inflation gauge is the marquee macro event. Core PCE price growth probably ran at 0.4% in January, double December's monthly pace, economists reckon. Suffice to say overshoots on CPI and PPI shifted the narrative. And meaningfully so. The PCE release will likely confirm that the disinflation process stalled last month. The Fed might not characterize it that way, but the word "stall" is in their vocabulary. It m