This week’s hot data

Oh, normal people know it’s 2026 because it says so on their calendars? Because they made New Year’s resolutions? Because they randomly picked up a new hobby like thematic gardening or began knitting every person they know a scarf?

Finance nerds like us know another year has passed because there’s shiny new economic data to unpack. Ahh, the sweet smell of CPI data.

The release of December’s consumer price data kicked off a busy week for economists. Consumer prices jumped 2.7% for the year, and 0.3% for the month, offering a closer look at inflation as the Federal Reserve prepares to meet again later in January.

Core prices, which exclude volatile food and energy prices, climbed 2.6% for the year, and 0.2% for the month.

“A lot of the macroeconomists are saying, well, core was a little lower than expectations, and the headline was maybe a little bit softer than expectations. So all in all, the inflation news was pretty good,” Jon Hilsenrath, a senior advisor to StoneX, a financial services company, told CFO Brew. “I’m more in the hawkish camp. I think that because of the government shutdown, they had to do a lot of imputation, which is holding these numbers down.”

Others economic experts, like Bernard Yaros, lead US economist at Oxford Economics, similarly expect it won’t “be until midyear that we start to really get a cleaner read,” per Morningstar.

And while the December data is less impacted than previous months by the government shutdown, it’s far from the only way to get a read on inflation.

“My proxy for inflation has been the cost of a haircut, because a haircut is not a globally traded good. You can’t outsource it to China, and you can’t automate it to a machine, at least as of now,” Hilsenrath said. “What goes into the cost of a haircut is basically labor and rent. A lot of services that I look at, outside of rent, are a little higher than they were pre-Covid. I think there’s more pressure on inflation than the numbers suggest.”

In any case, there are more numbers to look at later this week. A slate of delayed reports—US retail sales, the producer price index, and US import prices—are due out Wednesday and Thursday, as will an initial reading on jobless claims from the Department of Labor.