By Paul Gomme and Peter Rupert
The BEA announced that the PCE price index for July rose 1.89% at a seasonally adjusted annual rate. The year over year rate increased 3.70% and our trend measure increased 2.84% after an increase of 3.31% in June and 5.52% in May.
The PCE ex food and energy increased 2.99% at a seasonally adjusted annual rate. The year over year increase came in at 3.44%, the same as in June. Our trend measure increased 3.14% (interesting, economists typically use 
Some readers may recall that Fed chairman Kevin Warsh has been talking about trimmed mean measures of inflaton. Fortunately for us, folks at the Dalls Fed have done the hard work of producing such measures. The monthly series is extremely volatile and so it’s not clear it’s a very good measure of `trend’ inflation (meaning: where is inflation going). The annual version is much smoother, but probably suffers from issues we’ve discussed before: as an annual measure, it responds slowly to changed in the underlying trend. As with other measures of PCE inflation, these series exhibit a downward trend starting in 2023. And as with other measures of PCE inflation, the Fed still has work to do to bring inflation down to its 2% target.
The inflation numbers remain elevated and are certainly front and center at the Jackson Hole meeting this week.
