Just saying, I think you should get credit for “purple first” if you pick the hardest category, even if it’s not technically purple.

Update: www.nytimes.com/2026/04/20/u...

Warsh is set to tell lawmakers on Tuesday that the Fed's independence in setting rates is "essential" but that policy decisions related to bank regulation and "public monies" should not be given the same deference

With a killer kicker from Sonu Varghese:
Whether at the grocery store or the gas pump, “one person’s inflation,” he said, “is often just someone else’s margin expansion.”

Tariffs? Inflation? War? For all the turmoil in recent years, nothing has stopped U.S. corporations from earning record profits. There's little reason to think the latest energy shock will be any different.
Smart story from @talsmith.bsky.social:
www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/b...

Sounds like things are going well over at the Department of Labor.
Incredible reporting from Rebecca Davis O'Brien:
www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/u...

The combination of higher prices and slower wage growth is hitting workers' wallets. Average hourly earnings, adjusted for inflation, are barely up over the past year, especially for rank-and-file workers.

The combination of higher prices and slower wage growth is hitting workers' wallets. Average hourly earnings, adjusted for inflation, are barely up over the past year, especially for rank-and-file workers.

Grocery prices actually fell slightly in March (and were up just 1.9% y/y). But that's unlikely to continue given the war's impact on prices for fertilizer and diesel, both key inputs to agriculture.

The one exception may be airfares, which are up 14.9 percent from a year earlier. (The monthly data is very volatile though.)

The good news is that higher energy prices have not so far (emphasis on "so far") filtered into consumer prices more broadly. Excluding energy, prices were up 2.6 percent from a year earlier, up just a tenth of a point from February.

Energy prices were up nearly 11 percent in March, accounting for 0.7 of the 0.9 percentage point increase in overall prices. Gasoline prices were up more than 20 percent.

Prices jumped 0.9 percent in March alone, the biggest one-month increase since June 2022, during the oil-price spike following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Consumer prices were up 3.3% in March, the fastest inflation rate of Trump's second term. The jump was driven almost entirely by higher energy prices, the direct result of the war with Iran. #NumbersDay

Data: www.bls.gov/news.release...
Full coverage: www.nytimes.com/live/2026/04...

U.S. consumer prices rose 0.9 percent in March, driven by a nearly 11 percent jump in energy costs. Overall prices were up 3.3 percent from a year earlier. "Core" prices, excluding the volatile food and energy categories, were up 0.2 percent month/month, and 2.6 percent year/year. #NumbersDay

I think their justification (not endorsing) would be that CPI is their standard source, and they just used PPI in January because the CPI data looked like an obvious outlier.

Change in Data Sources Led to Lower Inflation Reading

Background on all this in my story from last month. Curious what @jc-econ.bsky.social and others think of today's news. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/b...

BEA: "In January 2026 the unpublished CPI showed an unprecedented increase that could not be substantiated by any other data. As a result, BEA made a downward adjustment to the PCE price index using changes in the BLS producer price index (PPI) for legal services to inform the adjustment."

Update on the PCE legal services drama from last month:
BEA says it went back to using CPI data for the February CPI, after using PPI to adjust the data in January.
It also released an FAQ that addresses the decision (though not in much detail):
www.bea.gov/help/faq/1486

Good Q.
Yes, food and energy are incredibly important. But they are also volatile. They move up and down a lot. So they don't tell us much about where inflation is headed. "Core" prices are more useful for forecasting the future. But everyone agrees that food & energy matter a ton in the real world.

Meanwhile, Q4 GDP growth was revised down to 0.5% annualized. "Final sales to private domestic purchasers," often cited as a measure of underlying demand, was also revised down, though it looks a bit better.

Consumer spending is barely keeping up with inflation. Real spending was flat in January and up just 0.1% in February. That follows surprisingly weak 1.9% annualized spending growth in the fourth quarter of 2025.

Americans' income didn't keep up with inflation in February. Real income, excluding transfer payments, fell 0.4% in February, and the three-month average was also negative. Real income excluding transfers is one of the metrics that NBER uses in determining recessions.

Inflation was looking like a problem even before the war. On a three-month annualized basis, PCE (both headline and core) topped 4% in February. Year-over-year core PCE is up 3%. And now the war will push prices higher. #NumbersDay
More from @colbylsmith.bsky.social: www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/b...

Thursday morning econ data: Inflation up, income down and consumer spending soft in February (and that's *before* the impact of the war). And GDP was even weaker at the end of last year than previously known. #NumbersDay #EconSky

ping!

3. Some of these trends certainly could be driven at least in part by AI. But for reference, here are the charts of some of the industries that have gotten talked about the most in the AI conversation.

2. As others have guessed, some of these are almost certainly examples of industries that were hit by rate hikes, which began at more or less the same time. Basically everything housing-related turns down starting in 2022.

1. I picked these industries based on the charts, without industry names attached. So it's a semi-random collection of examples I thought were interesting. There were plenty of others that looked visually similar.