Underlying price growth on the Fed’s preferred inflation metric decelerated sharply in June from the prior month’s pace, Thursday’s update from the BEA showed.

The data, which was incorporated in the advance read on Q2 GDP, is old news in the context of rekindled tensions in the Mideast, where the missiles were still flying on Thursday following a material mid-week escalation that found Saudi Arabia joining the US in bombing IRGC-backed militias in Iraq.

With the fate of the conflict, and thereby the trajectory for crude prices, in flux, one-month-old inflation data’s not much use. Still, it was nice to see core PCE print an unrounded 0.132% for June, down meaningfully from May’s 0.332%.

The YoY pace, 3.3%, was below the 3.4% consensus expected. Headline PCE printed a small MoM decline as energy prices receded. The YoY pace was unchanged at 3.7%.

So-called “supercore” inflation — services price growth excluding housing — downshifted to just 0.12% MoM versus 0.52% in May. That’ll be welcome news at the Fed.

Although nominal personal spending downshifted to reflect a 0.3% MoM gain, real spending held up just fine during the final month of Q2.

As the figure shows, June’s 0.4% pace matched the prior month’s solid showing. Both represent the briskest pace of inflation-adjusted spending since last summer.

I should note that the saving rate fell to 2.7%, among the lowest readings on record excluding the lead-up to the GFC.

Other than that, and with the caveat that anything which didn’t happen in the last five minutes is old news in the Trump era, it was hard to nitpick the June personal income and spending release.