“Can you hear me now?” asked the war.

Wholesale inflation ran far faster than expected in April, the BLS said Wednesday, in a release that appeared to underscore the message from an uncomfortably warm, if mostly inconclusive, CPI report the day before.

The headline PPI index rose 1.4% last month from March, nearly triple consensus and the largest MoM advance since March of 2022, which is to say the biggest monthly gain since Vladimir Putin’s, um, wholesale invasion of Ukraine.

The YoY jump on the headline final demand index was an eye-watering 6%, ahead of every estimate.

Not surprisingly, the energy gauge posted another outsized gain, rising 7.8% on the heels of a 10% jump the prior month. That increase, and specifically a 15.6% jump on the gasoline index, explains most of the 2% MoM gain on the goods side.

And yet, most of the headline gain (60%) was attributable to 1.2% MoM increase on the services index, where a measure of margins for machinery and equipment rose a hefty 3.5% and a gauge covering trucking freight rose more than 8%, the most on record.

Note that April’s jump there was nearly twice that seen around the onset of full-on war in Ukraine.

Core PPI (i.e., the ex-food and energy index) jumped 1% from March, more than triple estimates. The YoY advance there was a pronounced 5.2%.

Note that although trade services margins accounted for two-thirds of the overall services PPI gain, the core gauge that strips out trade services still rose 0.6% in April from March, twice as quickly as expected on the way to the biggest YoY gain since the beginning of 2023.

The silver lining, if there was one, is that the categories economists use to forecast PCE inflation weren’t too bad in aggregate, as a jump in airfares and health care costs was mitigated by a drop in portfolio management fees.