The New York Fed released its consumer expectations report on Tuesday. Who’s excited?!

These releases are the bane of my existence: They’re completely irrelevant, but for whatever reason, the financial media tends to cover them, so I’m compelled to go through the motions.

This one — the October vintage — was pretty upbeat, actually. Inflation expectations slipped at every horizon. The year-ahead point was just 2.87%, the lowest since October of 2020, when core CPI was running 1.61%.

At the three-year point, expectations were 2.54%. As the figure shows, these series have by and large normalized. Ironically, the Fed pays less attention to this data (i.e., their own data) than they do the expectations series from the University of Michigan sentiment release, but on the off chance anyone on the Committee bothered to read Tuesday’s NY Fed poll, they were probably pleased.

Notably, disagreement about the future trajectory of inflation among respondents slipped at every horizon. That matters. You don’t want mass confusion about the likely pace of consumer price growth. The demographic breakdown didn’t evidence any anomalies across income groups or education cohorts.

Views on the labor market improved markedly. Specifically, respondents’ perceptions about the availability of jobs in the event theirs is lost were better, at 56%. As the figure shows, that represented the sunniest outlook in a year.

At the same time, the mean probability that the jobless rate will be higher this time next year was 34.5% in the October survey. That was the lowest since the beginning of 2022, which is to say the lowest since the Fed started hiking rates.

Oh, and the mean perceived probability that stocks will be higher 12 months from now slipped a bit to 39.1%.

I guess there’s supposed to be a funny punchline here, but I looked and I couldn’t find it.