Good news: Wednesday’s update on wholesale prices across the world’s largest economy looked benign.

If that sounds boring to you, that’s because it is. But it’s more notable than it would be in the normal course of macro business for two reasons.

First, last month’s PPI release (covering factory gate inflation in July) was anything but benign. Rather, it was outright concerning. Now, with the numbers covering August in hand, the prior month’s troublesome report looks like an anomaly rather than the start of something nefarious.

Second, Tuesday’s enormous downward revision to total nonfarm payrolls in the year to March pushed market pricing for 2025 Fed cuts very near 75bps, which is to say to the brink of three fully-priced cuts. A 50bps cut next week is on the table (I don’t care what anyone else tells you), even if it’s not the most likely outcome. A warm read on inflation — either from Wednesday’s PPI release or especially from Thursday’s CPI tally — would’ve complicated matters by making the optics of a dovish inflection more challenging.

With that in mind, the headline final demand print on the PPI release actually showed a MoM decline, the first since April and the third of 2025.

As the figure shows, July’s disconcerting 0.9% read was revised to show a still high, but less acute, 0.7% advance. As initially reported, that readout counted as the quickest in three years.

The same dynamic — i.e., a sharp cooldown and a favorable revision — was evident on the services gauge, which showed a 0.2% decline for August after a downwardly-revised 0.7% increase in July.

Even more notable, perhaps, was the trade services index which showed a 1.7% drop. July’s 2% surge on that measure was revised in half.

The trade gauge tracks wholesaler and retailer margins. July’s advance, as initially reported, was the third-largest in the history of the series. The revised figure for that month is now quite pedestrian, and August’s MoM print counts among the largest month-to-month declines on record.

It was more or less the same thing on the goods side. The goods index posted a 0.1% advance for August down from the prior month’s 0.6% increase.

I know what you’re thinking: Gosh, this is all really convenient! I won’t argue. With the exclamation, nor necessarily with the insinuation. But the BLS earlier this year discontinued hundreds of PPI indexes beginning with wholesale inflation reports for July and August, which is to say beginning with the releases discussed above.

That cutback was apparently the result of staff shortages tied to Donald Trump’s federal hiring freeze. As Inflation Insights’s Omair Sharif put it at the time, “The PPI is cutting hundreds of indexes from production [and] that alone is worrying given that we’re heading into the teeth of the tariff impact on prices.”

The point is: If you’re inclined to cast aspersions at the data in the course of positing a pro-Trump or an anti-Trump conspiracy (and both sides are predisposed to conspiracy theorizing at this point), just bear in the mind that if the data’s less reliable, it’s hard to know what’s deliberate and what’s just the result of resource constraints. At the very least, such constraints should be expected to make the data more volatile.

Anyway, the categories which factor into (gu)es(s)timates for the core PCE tally — airfares, doctor visits, portfolio management and so on — were a mixed bag. There’s not a lot to be gleaned there for anyone trying to “refine” their forecast.

All in all, this release was soft, and coming full circle, that’s good news. Even as all good news these days comes with a laundry list of caveats.