U.S. inflation picked up in April after a very weak start to the year, a development that could help to ease Federal Reserve officials’ recent concerns about tepid price pressures.
The Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, the price index for personal-consumption expenditures, rose a seasonally adjusted 0.31% in April from March and 1.51% from a year earlier, the Commerce Department said Friday.
Excluding volatile food and energy items, the so-called core PCE price index was up 0.25% from March—the fastest monthly pace since October 2016—and 1.57% from April 2018. Economist surveyed by The Wall Street Journal had expected core PCE prices to rise 0.2% on the month and 1.6% on the year.
The Commerce Department also revised down its inflation numbers for the first three months of the year. The PCE price index in March was up 1.44% from the year-ago month, down from a previous estimate of 1.49%
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