Producer prices rose in July, but that’s not all that concerning
Producer prices rose in July, but that’s not all that concerning
After the release of the consumer price index on Thursday, the Labor Department reported Friday that producer prices were up .3% in July.
That’s more than they rose in May and June, and a lot of the increase in the most recent producer price index was thanks to inflation in the services sector.
The Labor Department looks at a broad range of services when it puts together the producer price index: “Publishing, banking, lodging, health care services,” said Erica Groshen at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
She used to run the Bureau of Labor Statistics and said that unlike the consumer price index, which figures out what prices consumers are seeing on the shelves, the producer price index gets at a slightly different question: “What is the change in the prices that our domestic producers are receiving?”
In some cases, that’s just another way of asking about what consumers end up having to pay. But the Labor Department also asks what service providers are charging the government and what they’re charging to sell their services out of the country, added Groshen.
“So entertainment services, for example, are sold overseas quite a bit,” she said.
Economists pay attention to producer prices, because if they increase for services, for instance, “then that could prompt the final sellers of that service to increase prices to cover their input costs,” said Kathy Bostjancic, chief economist at Nationwide.
Right now, any increase in services inflation would be concerning, she said, “because that’s the portion of inflation that has been the stickiest at the consumer level.”
But in July, a big chunk of services inflation was because of management fees for investment portfolios.
“What we’re seeing here is potentially is a big increase in stock prices have led to an increase in management fees,” said Jesse Wheeler, senior economist at Morning Consult.
Thing is, the stock market is not the economy and stocks also come down.
“So if we saw, like, a big increase in producer prices for food or for rail and truck freight transport, I’d be very concerned about that,” said Wheeler. “But I’m not necessarily that concerned about a big spike in portfolio management fees.”
And if you strip that out, Wheeler noted that producer price inflation is continuing to slow down.
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