The war-driven surge in fuel costs and a generalized sense that “stuff’s getting more expensive all the time” pushed near-term household inflation expectations to their highest levels since 2023 last month.

That was the main takeaway from the latest installment of the NY Fed’s monthly consumer expectations poll which, with apologies to the good folks who put it together, exactly no one cares about.

This survey’s a third-tier release if it’s even that. If you’re looking for a tradable, survey-based measure of household inflation expectations, you want the medium-term University of Michigan metric.

Still, Wednesday’s update on the NY Fed series is notable in the context of record-high diesel costs, soaring mortgage rates and a Fed chair whose tough guy act hasn’t dispelled concerns that the Committee’s price stability mandate will ultimately be subjugated to political imperatives.

There’s the chart. 3.9% was the highest on the 12-month, forward-looking measure since May of 2023. The medium-term metric was relatively benign at 3.25%, elevated in a historical context but not too bad considering the circumstances.

With the (not insignificant) caveat that this series is very, very young (it only dates to 2013), the latest read on the 12-month metric is the highest “ever” outside of the pandemic inflation.

The figure below shows you the spread between the share of survey respondents who said they expect to be better off a year from now and the share who said the opposite.

As you can see, that spread was -10.4 in September, the second-lowest ever outside of the pandemic/Biden inflation.

Note from the chart that the “better off”-“worse off” forward spread’s been negative in 16 of 19 months since Donald Trump returned to power.

Write your own “Golden Age” jokes. And set them to The 5th Dimension’s biggest hit. Or their fifth-biggest.