Efforts to stem inflation in the cost of services didn’t show much progress in April even though airfares continued to fall. That will help justify the Fed’s continued wait-and-see approach to cutting interest rates, even as overall inflation trends closer to the 2% target.
The BLS’s index for services, excluding those related to energy, rose 0.3% month over month in April. That is an acceleration from a 0.1% monthly pace in March.
The uptick was driven by shelter costs, but also prices for transportation services and medical-care services.