Technically, the market already had Thursday’s marquee US macro release in hand.

The BEA’s personal income and spending figures for June were incorporated in Wednesday’s advance read on Q2 GDP, but traders were nevertheless interested in the monthly breakout, or as interested as anyone can be during peak vacation season.

Underlying inflation ran an as-expected 0.3% (0.25635% unrounded) in June on the Fed’s preferred measure, Thursday’s update showed. That was the briskest since February. The release came with revisions which nudged some of this year’s other MoM prints higher. Those revisions are incorporated in the chart, below.

Recall that the quarterly core PCE print in the GDP tally was a touch warm. That biased Thursday’s monthly print for June to the upside. On a YoY basis, core PCE ran 2.8% last month.

Nobody’s going to get too bent out of shape about the overshoot on the monthly readout, but in the context of the tariffs, it was notable that the month-to-month gain for both goods price indexes was elevated — 0.4% for durable goods and 0.5% for nondurables. The services gauge, by contrast, rose 0.2% for a fourth straight month.

I’d gently suggest that taken on its own, the core PCE readout for June validates Jerome Powell’s cautiously hawkish stance, as communicated during Wednesday’s press conference.

Personal spending in Thursday’s update was on the tepid side. In nominal terms, spending rose 0.3% in June from May, slightly cooler than anticipated. In real terms, spending was more or less flat, and fell a third month for durable goods.

As the figure shows, we’re going nowhere fast in inflation-adjusted terms with the pull-forward effect from anticipatory spending now in the rearview.

Elsewhere in the release, personal incomes rose 0.3% in nominal terms (they were flat in real terms) and the saving rate, at 4.5%, was unchanged.

“We’re focused on the real pace of consumption given clear evidence that tariff pass-through has arrived,” BMO’s US rates team said Thursday. “The wildcard is how long consumers can keep up with increasing prices before needing to scale back spending on services to offset higher prices on goods.”