Ready your best gallows humor, it’s CPI week in the US.

Judging from reader comments and a smattering of hot-under-the-collar emails (“Hot time, summer in the city…”), I haven’t demonstrated sufficient dubiety vis-à-vis the BLS post-Erika McEntarfer’s abrupt ouster.

I find such allegations surprising given how much editorial bandwidth I have in fact dedicated to lamenting McEntarfer’s firing as yet another affront to democratic (small “d”) decorum and yet another sign of Donald Trump’s authoritarian proclivities.

Suffice to say for half of America — and for more than half of the international community — Trump derision’s a Bruce Dickinson-cowbell dynamic. That is: There’s no such thing as enough.

Anyway, a newly-beholden BLS will on Tuesday tell us what inflation wasn’t last month (there’s a joke in there, don’t miss it). Economists expect to hear core consumer price growth ran 0.3% in July, quicker than June’s MoM rate and the warmest since January.

Remember: Economists have overestimated this print five times in a row, and McEntarfer was still at the BLS for all five of those undershoots. It’d be karmically ironic for Trump if the inflation prints start overshooting now that she’s gone.

In the context of the tariffs, the goods/services breakdown will be watched closely. Consumer pass-through’s evident in some goods categories, but for the purposes of aggregate price growth, moderate services-sector inflation’s working as an offset. For now.

I shouldn’t have to repeat this, but foreign exporters don’t “pay” any portion of the tariffs. There are no checks written on that side. They might reduce their prices as a favor to US buyers, but such concessions tend to be the exception not the rule, and they’re typically not large. So, to the extent the levies aren’t being passed along to the American consumer, that’s margin for companies and while they have it to spare, they’d certainly rather not.

The key limiting factor on tariff pass-through isn’t Trump’s Saddam act (“Eat the tariff costs or eat a bullet!”), it’s the perception that consumers, at least at the low-end of the income spectrum, are either tapped out or getting there. That’s the link between the tariffs and aggregate demand, and that link feeds back into the services-sector price growth discussion.

“Some consumers will be able to easily absorb higher [goods] prices while others will struggle,” BMO’s Ian Lyngen and Vail Hartman remarked. “We’re primarily concerned about this from the perspective of a near-term headwind for aggregate demand rather than an immediate disinflationary impulse for service-sector inflation.”

Apropos of the demand discussion, market participants will get an update on nominal spending this week with retail sales due Friday. The BEA’s PCE tally suggests real spending’s treading water, but the nominal print from the Census Bureau will probably show a Prime Day-assisted 0.5% advance.

The control group will be eyed closely as usual. It’s seen at 0.4% from 0.5% in June.

The backdrop for all of this is obviously the sharp deceleration in hiring across the US economy. Fortunately, that’s not a real thing. The jobs numbers are “rigged.” The White House told me so. As such, Americans shouldn’t have any difficulty funding their conspicuous consumption habit going forward. If the data starts to suggest otherwise, well that data’s “rigged” too.

Also on the docket this week in the US: PPI and the preliminary read on University of Michigan sentiment for this month.

I’ll give the last word to JPMorgan’s Michael Feroli who recently noted that “the integrity of [the CPI] data is at least as important as the employment data.” “The $2.1 trillion market for TIPS is built on a foundation of trust in the construction of the CPI series [for which] even seemingly innocuous technical changes can matter,” he added.