The biggest wildcard for U.S. inflation over the next year doesn’t come from used cars or airline fares. Instead, it is housing.
Officials at the Federal Reserve and the White House have highlighted what many forecasters expect will be the temporary nature of elevated price readings stemming from the reopening of the economy following pandemic-related restrictions.
But the degree to which 12-month inflation readings fall back to the central bank’s 2% goal could rest on the behavior of rents and home prices. In recent months, housing-cost trends point to more persistent, rather than transitory, upward price pressures in the coming years.
Core inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy costs, rose 3.5% in June from a year earlier, according to the Fed’s preferred gauge, the personal-consumption expenditures price index. That was the highest rate of growth in 30 years. Rising prices over the April-to-June quarter largely reflected disrupted supply chains, temporary shortages and a rebound in travel—trends that came ahead of the latest virus surge caused by the Delta variant of the Covid-19 virus.
Economists at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. estimate that travel and other supply-constrained categories have added 1.2 percentage points to core inflation this year, and they forecast those contributions should wane to around 0.6 percentage point by the end of the year.
