US inflation ebbed last month but likely due to transitory factors that counsel looking through the downside miss to core inflation. The Delta variant’s impact on travel and lodging plus autos drove all of the miss. Key is the month-ago core CPI rate that ebbed to an annualized month-ago rate of just 1.2% (chart 1). That cuts through base effect drivers to look at price pressures at the margin. Well that’s clearly it, inflation’s over, nothing to see from here! Not. Over-reacting to one downside miss makes about as much sense as over-reacting to upside hits as the trend is expected to remain well above the Fed’s ... (full story)