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CPI: Businesses Not Passing Savings Down To Consumers?

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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burning-money-pic14The reading on inflation from the Labor Department on Consumer Price Index is out.  The CPI for March came out at -0.1% for nominal CPI and +0.2% on the core CPI measurement of ex-food and ex-energy.  Despite a much lower PPI reading yesterday, Bloomberg had the consensus estimates listed as +0.2% on both the nominal and core CPI.

The big drop was in energy with -3.0%.  Interestingly enough, this CPI number looks like it would have been better if there were not increased tobacco prices.  There was also an increase in education and communication costs, so go figure.

These are still deflationary in nature, just not to the tune that we saw on the producer side yesterday.  Maybe business is charging more than they had been able to in the past as producers have generally had a hard time passing on costs increases to consumers on the upside.  It seems on the downside of pricing that they are maybe keeping the savings this time.

JON C. OGG

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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