The last of this week’s key US macro releases printed largely in line with consensus.

Not that anyone was inclined to care on Friday, what with Donald Trump’s tariff threats commanding traders’ attention and monopolizing market-related headlines.

Core price growth on the Fed’s preferred inflation measure ran 0.156% in December from November, the BEA said. Rounded, that matched the 0.2% consensus, and I suppose counted as a second consecutive “benign” read.

The YoY pace was unchanged for a third month at 2.8%, well above target, underscoring the Fed’s allusions to a stalled underlying disinflation process. During his press conference this week, Jerome Powell was quite explicit that the 12-month pace is what matters (that’s the mandate, after all), and on that score, the job’s not finished. Headline PCE ran 0.3% MoM in December and 2.6% YoY.

I wouldn’t want to suggest these readings would be “acceptable” for the Fed in an alternate reality where Kamala Harris was president but… well, Powell’s obfuscation aside, a very big part of the Fed’s trepidation is indeed attributable to ostensible upside inflation risks from Donald Trump’s policy agenda, including and especially tariffs.

So-called “supercore” inflation — which counts services price growth and excludes housing — was 0.3% in December, inconsistent with a return to price stability for the collection of categories the Fed imagines are a better proxy for the “actual” trend.

Not surprisingly given a robust read on personal consumption in Thursday’s advance look at Q4 GDP, personal spending in December was strong, rising 0.7% from November. That matched the highest guess from five-dozen economists who either didn’t try to revise their estimates post-GDP or else couldn’t figure out the math. Friday’s personal income and spending data was obviously incorporated into Thursday’s release. (To be fair, that math’s actually not straightforward.)

Real personal spending rose 0.4% in December. That too beat estimates. Incomes were in line, rising 0.4%. The saving rate was 3.8%, the lowest since December of 2022. (“Spend it if ya got it!” “You can’t take it with you.” And so on.)

Meanwhile, the Fed’s favorite measure of labor costs posted a 0.9% advance for Q4, according to the BLS. That matched estimates and marked a pickup from Q3.

Regular readers are aware of the backstory: It was that indicator — the Employment Cost Index — which spooked Powell in late 2021, not any one month’s CPI print.

But, as noted in this week’s macro preview, ECI’s relevance for the Fed’s decision calculus is diminished now. The Committee’s adamant that the US labor market no longer presents an upside risk to inflation, never mind the self-evident fact that if you have a job, and your wages are outstripping prices, you’ll have “extra” money to spend into an economy that’s still experiencing above-target price growth.

All in all, Friday’s figures constituted “a remarkably consensus round of data that [did] nothing to shift the market’s read on the real economy,” as BMO’s Ian Lyngen put it, adding that “from here,” traders will be “watching for any headlines related to the looming 25% tariff increases on Canada and Mexico.”