A quick summary of how today’s CPI release compared to Dotdat’s real-time CPIs over February. We’re generally very pleased with how our ‘Alt’ inflation series, released this month, anticipated this month’s official prints across the CPI’s building blocks.

Takeaways

• February’s official CPI release generally was in line the real-time data, both Headline and Core. The recent string of solid prints in the Core CPI, both official and real-time, appears intact.

• Dotdat’s real-time CPIs anticipated trends in both Core Services and Goods well, particularly in Core Housing Services and Transport Services—notably, Airfares—and Core Goods across the board: Apparel, Housing Goods, and Vehicles.

• The well-documented inertia in Services inflation continues to play out across sectors, and showed up in the slight acceleration in Core Housing Services in the official data, which brought the BLS’s prints a bit closer to the stronger trend in the real-time data over the past months.

• As always, with some caveats. While we expected Used Car prices to decline, the magnitude of February’s decline was higher in the BLS’s than in Dotdat’s data. Core Goods ex Used Cars inflation held firm in February in the official data, in line with the strength in the real-time data.

• Our Gasoline index came in above the BLS’s print, likely following too-aggressive implementation of lags in our recent revision. We include here the print in our ‘spot’ real-time series, which matched the BLS well.

Headline

Dotdat’s real-time Headline CPI rose by 0.5 percent over February, up from its 0.3 percent increase in January, and slightly above the official CPI-U print of 0.4. The figure’s blue line is the rolling monthly average of Dotdat’s daily Headline CPI and its grey line the equivalent BLS CPI-U series. In most of the figures below, a thick blue line is Dotdat’s data for that series, and the grey line the equivalent CPI-U series, as released today.

Core

Dotdat’s real-time Core CPI (CPI ex energy and food) rose by 0.35 percent over February after rising 0.37 percent in January, and in line with the solid trend in the official data. This real-time CPI generally runs about 10 bps below the official data.