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The market cools down, and trading returns to the underlying logic of US inflation
Wonderful introduction:
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Hello everyone, today XM Forex will bring you "[XM Group]: The market cools down, and trading returns to the underlying logic of US inflation." Hope this helps you! The original content is as follows:
U.S. inflation will enter its fifth year after breaking through the Federal Reserve's 2% target. There is a high probability that the U.S. inflation rate in 2026 will continue to remain high around 3%.
The labor market is tight, consumer spending is strong, tariff costs are gradually transmitted downwards, and there is an obvious lag in housing inflation indicators. Multiple factors together constitute the core incentive for inflation to be sticky.
Recently, the market has shown signs of marginal easing of inflation, especially the slowdown in the price increases of core services and motor vehicles.
But this does not mean that signs of deflation will continue to ferment in 2026. At the same time, the difficulty of monitoring inflation at the current stage has increased significantly.
Data distortion and collection interruptions, great uncertainty in tariff policies, and economic structural adjustments caused by demographic changes have all brought multiple disturbances to the analysis of inflation trends and interpretation of actual data. The market seems to have ended its unilateral trend. To seize the trading opportunities brought about by inflation, we must study and understand how to observe inflation well and avoid misinterpretation of data.
The U.S. federal government shutdown in 2025 directly disrupted the routine collection of inflation data. The monthly core inflation data in October was basically missing, and the November data was collected within a www.xmtraders.compressed time window.
The continued distortion of data makes it difficult for the market to make highly certain trend judgments on month-on-month inflation data.
The Owner Equivalent Rent (OER) indicator in the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which was highlighted in the previous article, is still distorting the true trend of inflation (due to the lack of collection, OER has been a very low number for three consecutive months). This indicator occupies too high a weight in the CPI basket of www.xmtraders.components, and is not accurate.However, its impact on the Fed's preferred core personal consumption expenditures index (PCE) has been relatively limited.
Based on the multiple disturbing factors of the current inflation trend, this article will clarify the core monitoring logic and key dimensions of U.S. inflation data in the www.xmtraders.coming months.
Tariffs have further pushed up www.xmtraders.commodity inflation, which has already entered an upward trend
Core www.xmtraders.commodity inflation will show a deflationary trend for most of 2024, and after the emergence of tariffs, the price of this sector started an upward trend.
As supply chains and market demand gradually return to normal, the window period for www.xmtraders.commodity prices to fall sharply has basically closed. Before the implementation of tariff policies, core www.xmtraders.commodity inflation will rise moderately in 2025, with a year-on-year increase of less than 1%.
After superimposing the impact of tariff policies, it is estimated that the contribution of core www.xmtraders.commodities to the year-on-year increase in core CPI in the third quarter of 2025 increased by 0.3 percentage points, which is much higher than the normal level before the new crown epidemic.
What worries the market is that the transmission effect of tariffs on end consumer prices has not yet been fully released, and this transmission effect is expected to reach its peak in the second quarter of 2026.
Whether it is survey data from the Institute for Supply Management (ISM), the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), or corporate survey results from the Federal Reserve Banks of various regions, they all reflect significant upward pressure on prices. The trend of such data is www.xmtraders.completely contrary to the official CPI data.
In fact, NFIB’s small business survey shows that a high proportion of www.xmtraders.companies reported three major current situations: first, they have www.xmtraders.completed product price increases; second, they plan to continue to increase prices; third, even if the recent market performance is weak, www.xmtraders.companies still have difficulty recruiting qualified labor.
It is worth focusing on that the Producer Price Index (PPI) in December 2025 shows that the price pressure caused by tariffs is still being transmitted through the supply chain and will continue to push up end consumer prices in 2026. This is also the famous scene recently made by Maxine Waters in the House of Representatives Financial Services www.xmtraders.committee. She said on the spot The chairman of the www.xmtraders.committee shouted: "Can you shut him up? One of the reasons he pointed to Bessent.
Although the rise in PPI in December was mainly driven by the service sector, the market must not misread this signal: the core driver of this rise in PPI is the price increase in the wholesale trade of machinery and equipment.
This data clearly shows It shows that tariff pressure is gradually transmitted along the supply chain, and will continue to penetrate into the final production link in the first half of 2026, and will eventually be www.xmtraders.completely passed on to the consumer end.
Excluding the core services of housing, it is still the largest contributor to the rise in inflation
The core obstacle to the return of the inflation rate to the Fed's 2% target is to exclude the core services of housing. Housing's core service inflation - in the past 40 years, the year-on-year growth rate of this indicator has never turned negative.
Simply speaking, this sector will not experience substantial deflationary pressure, and more importantly, its deflation will be extremely limited.
The inflation trend of this sector is highly dependent on wage levels. After all, the service industry is a typical one.labor-intensive areas.
Considering that the labor market will continue to be tight, it is difficult for wages to fall significantly. Therefore, core service inflation excluding housing lacks a basis for a substantial downward trend.
What needs to be made clear is that the high service inflation is largely due to the tight labor market.
From the perspective of gross value added (GVA), that is, the contribution of each sector to GDP, employee www.xmtraders.compensation accounts for 49% of the input costs of the service industry, while this proportion is 46% for the goods industry.
Among them, the trade, transportation and warehousing industries are particularly affected by tariff pressure due to their slim profit margins. The extent of the impact of tariffs is almost seven times that of the goods and services industry as a whole.
The pressure on the industry’s profit margins reflected in the December 2025 PPI report is not an isolated case.
This data also means that the transmission effect of tariffs is gradually getting closer to end consumers along the supply chain.
Looking back at April 2025, www.xmtraders.commodity prices have soared. The core reason is that www.xmtraders.companies will postpone the cost of paying tariffs by increasing inventory.
Another important reason why many consumer-facing www.xmtraders.companies are unwilling to pass on the tariff pressure significantly is to maintain existing market share.
This judgment has also been verified: consumption performance in the 2025 holiday shopping season is very strong. The market expects that goods will be more expensive in the future, so it chooses to stock up in advance before the effects of tariffs appear.
In fact, the reason is also very simple. The spot and forward freight rates are much higher, which means that importers and exporters are rushing to import and export. At the same time, sales manufacturers are increasing revenue without increasing profits, and gross profit margins are shrinking rapidly.
Housing inflation: the dual result of lagging changes and flaws in statistical methodology
There is a significant lag between the housing inflation indicator (owner equivalent rent OER) in the CPI and the actual trend of the real estate market. According to estimates, the lag time is close to two years.
From this perspective, there are basically no surprises in the trend of OER in the next year, because the market has fully grasped the actual operating rules of house prices in the past.
In other words, a significant decline in OER will most likely occur in 2027. However, due to the statistical calculation method of OER, it can only be roughly estimated, especially the lack of relevant data in October 2025.
The way the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics corrects this part of the missing data in October 2025 may lead to an unexpected decline in the OER indicator.
Another important factor in the relatively mild trend of CPI in 2026 is the adjustment of the weight of the CPI basket of www.xmtraders.commodities. Among them, the weight of housing indicators is expected to increase, while the weight of www.xmtraders.commodity indicators will be reduced accordingly. This is an important detail because housing prices are falling.
On the surface, this adjustment is positive for CPI trends, but has minimal impact on the Fed’s preferred personal consumption expenditures (PCE) inflation indicator.
More importantly, indicatorsThe adjustment of weights is not a substantial deflationary trend and cannot change the core operating logic of inflation.
In fact, this weight adjustment may eventually have an adverse impact on the CPI trend, because the statistics of some indicators have obvious lags. Auto insurance is a typical representative. Auto insurance prices show a www.xmtraders.compensatory increase in CPI statistics. If tariffs further push up auto prices, auto insurance prices will also rise simultaneously, and the weight of auto insurance in the CPI will increase in 2026.
The above content is all about "[XM Group]: Market cooling, trading returns to the underlying logic of US inflation". It is carefully www.xmtraders.compiled and edited by the XM foreign exchange editor. I hope it will be helpful to your trading! Thanks for the support!
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