U.S. consumer prices rose for a third straight month in June, eating away at modest wage gains and sending inflation to its highest rate in more than six years.
The consumer-price index, which gauges what Americans pay for everything from veterinarian services to baby clothes, rose a seasonally adjusted 0.1% in June from the prior month, the Labor Department said Thursday. Excluding volatile food and energy components, prices increased 0.2%. Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal had expected a 0.2% uptick from May for both the overall index and so-called core inflation.
Last month’s price increases brought the CPI’s cumulative growth in June from a year earlier to 2.9%, the highest level since February 2012. Core inflation ticked up to 2.3% in June from a year earlier, the highest rate since January 2017.
For a second month in a row, annual inflation fully offset average hourly wage growth in June, leaving workers’ real hourly earnings flat from a year earlier despite falling unemployment and a generally strong economy. Production and nonsupervisory employees, a category which includes blue-collar workers, saw their real average hourly wages fall 0.2% in June from a year earlier after a similar slip in May.
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