Hotter-Than-Expected Inflation Clouds Rate-Cut Outlook

US: Inflation eased again in January but came in above Wall Street’s expectations, clouding the Federal Reserve’s path to rate cuts and potentially giving the central bank breathing space to wait until the middle of the year.

The Labor Department reported Tuesday that consumer prices rose 3.1% in January from a year earlier, versus a December gain of 3.4%. That marked the lowest reading since June.

Still, the consumer-price index was higher than the predicted 2.9%, a disappointment for investors who hope the Fed will cut rates sooner rather than later. Rate cuts tend to help stock prices by boosting economic activity and reducing competition from bonds for investor dollars.

The release gave a nasty jolt to markets. Stocks fell sharply and bond yields rose. The Dow Jones Industrial Average slid more than 500 points, or about 1.4%, its worst one-day decline since March. For all three major U.S. stock indexes, it was their worst performance on a CPI release day since September 2022 , according to Dow Jones Market Data.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury note rose to 4.315%, bringing it to its highest level since the end of November.

Interest-rate futures, which before Tuesday’s report implied the central bank would probably begin cutting rates by its May meeting, now suggest a June start date is more likely.

Where the Fed could go from here

Investors’ belief that Fed cuts were imminent has helped fuel the rally in stocks. The Dow on Monday had hit its 12th record close of 2024.

But Tuesday’s inflation report underscores why Fed officials have been dismissive of such expectations. Some Fed officials have suggested that the pace of improvement over the past six months might overstate underlying progress in containing price pressures.

Officials have said they aren’t ready to entertain rate cuts at their next meeting, March 19-20, because they want to see more evidence that inflation is returning to their 2% target.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell has said officials want to see more evidence that inflation is returning to its 2% goal, which is measured against a separate gauge to be released later this month by the Commerce Department.

“It’s not that the data aren’t good enough. It’s that there’s really six months of data,” Powell said in an interview on “60 Minutes” earlier this month. “It doesn’t need to be better than what we’ve seen, or even as good. It just needs to be good.”

Core prices, which exclude food and energy items in an effort to better track inflation’s underlying trend, were up 3.9% in January. That was equal to December’s gain, which was the lowest since mid-2021.

From a month earlier, overall prices were up a seasonally adjusted 0.3%, and core prices were up 0.4%—larger gains than economists expected.

Two measures of inflation

The Fed’s preferred measure of inflation has been running cooler than the Labor Department’s, and analysts said that could continue in January. The figures released Tuesday calculate medical care and airfares differently, and those categories were especially strong in January. The Labor Department’s measure also puts a much higher weight on shelter costs, which for both owners and renters are derived from rents. Shelter costs accounted for 0.23 percentage point of the monthly gain in overall prices in January. Shelter costs were up 0.6% month over month.

Some Fed officials have said they are looking for evidence that a slowdown in price pressures is broadening beyond goods such as used cars, which have seen prices decline over the past year. Tuesday’s figure showed the opposite: Price declines accelerated for goods while price increases accelerated for services.

And prices are still far above where they were before the pandemic—especially for items that most Americans buy often, like groceries.

The sting of those past price increases might be part of why so many Americans remain down on the economy . An analysis conducted by Goldman Sachs economists suggests that frustration with high price levels might have contributed to low confidence readings that persisted in the early 1980s even after inflation had slipped sharply.

“It does seem like it takes a while for confidence to recover, in part because people are focused on levels rather than changes,” said Goldman chief economist Jan Hatzius .

The Labor Department’s measure of overall consumer prices was up 19.6% this January from four years earlier, just before the pandemic hit. In contrast, prices were up 8.9% in the four years ended January 2020.

Economists generally expect inflation to cool this year, though they caution the process could be bumpy. Cooling prices for newly signed leases, for example, should eventually translate into lower shelter costs.

“I can tell inflation has gotten better,” said Mike Poore, of Henderson, Ky. “That’s definitely a good thing. It’s a shame it’s not happening quicker.”

The high cost of groceries

A Bank of America Institute analysis of customer data found households tended to make far more transactions a month for food and drinks at restaurants and bars, for groceries and for gasoline than they do for other items. Labor Department figures show that prices in all three of those frequent-transaction categories are higher, relative to before the pandemic, than prices overall.

Research from University of California, Berkeley economist Ulrike Malmendier and three co-authors found that prices for items that people buy more often play an outsize role in framing their inflation expectations. “In terms of what gets ingrained in people’s brains, it’s stuff that they purchase frequently,” she said.

Other research Malmendier has conducted examines the scarring effects of inflation episodes , which can have persistent, and potentially costly, effects on people’s financial decisions. She is heartened by the fact that inflation has retreated relatively quickly from the 9.1% it hit in June 2022 —a contrast to the experience of the late 1970s and early 1980s, when inflation remained elevated for years.

“I’m a little less worried about long-lasting effects than I was in 2022,” she said.

You and a friend have a can’t-miss idea for a new business. You’ve got a great name, and the logo is perfect.

It is time to ask each other some hard questions.

Talking up front about tough subjects like how you work, how you deal with stress and your expectations for the business can save lots of headaches later. “Most issues are neutral when you discuss them ahead of time,” says Jane Brodsky , who ran a barre-and-spin studio with a partner for 10 years in Washington, D.C. “But in the heat of the moment, issues become personal and larger than they need to be.”

Here are crucial questions that should be settled at the start to help make the partnership succeed.

How did your family communicate?

Maybe you were raised in a family that talked through disagreements to find solutions. But maybe your partner grew up in a house where the loudest voice won. That could be a problem when issues arise in the business: Experts say that when people are under stress, they often fall back on behaviours that were imprinted at home—and different styles could clash.

At Happy Being, a company that sells nutritionally enhanced teas and drink powders, the three co-founders discussed communication style before they started the business. “We discovered that one partner gets triggered if he feels no one is listening,” says co-founder Dutch Buckley . “It goes back to an early fear of not being heard.” (For his part, co-founder Josemaria Silvestrini says that early on he “definitely needed the validation of being recognised and being right.”)

So, the three work at making sure everyone has a say in meetings, and they made a rule that no one’s work is ever belittled. On the flip side, when someone on the team accomplishes something, someone else on the team draws attention to it.

What does success look like to you? And failure?

While these may seem obvious—like, the business either succeeds or fails—everyone’s definition is different, and they are surprisingly specific. Certainly, monetary goals or anything that can be enumerated will help partners envision each other’s goals. Is one looking to grow slowly with customers and suppliers in the community and get to better than break even after three years, while the other wants to be cash-flow positive in year one and scale quickly to sell the business to a larger entity after 10 years? There’s a lot of success and failure in between those two outcomes, depending on your perspective.

Silvestrini of Happy Being recommends hashing it out together on the whiteboard until everyone agrees on an explicit definition of success for the company. “Hopefully, it’s an easy 10-minute conversation,” he says. “Because if founders have different objectives, the boat is going nowhere.”

What does everyone bring to the table?

It is crucial to discuss what each partner is contributing to the partnership in terms of expertise, experience, network and money. Kathryn Zambetti , an executive coach specialising in founder relationships, recommends taking an honest strengths-and-weaknesses inventory of yourself and your partner and then discussing what you both bring to the table. The exercise will help delineate which responsibilities naturally suit each partner, and it will highlight areas that will require additional work or outsourcing.

The clearer the roles can be defined, the better. If you are opening a bakery, you and your partner shouldn’t both be good at just making bread. Someone needs to handle marketing, suppliers, leases and licensing, financials and hiring and managing employees.

Why are you doing this?

You and your partner need to be in complete alignment on your motivations. Does this venture need to support your family or merely add to your vacation fund? Are you doing it to prove your father or your high-school econ teacher wrong? Any answer other than unfailing commitment to the mission or the product is a red flag.

“Your north star has to be something bigger than money to succeed,” says Buckley. “People will go through things that test them, but if money is the only motive, that won’t be enough.”

What pushes your buttons?

Just like in a marriage, you want to know best how to support and protect your business partner. Understanding what puts each of you in a fight-or-flight mode can be key to getting the best out of each other.

Do you need to be consulted on all decisions, or just major ones? Do you need to be recognized as the leader and sit at the head of the table? Do you fear having to downsize your home if the business fails?

What does your workday look like?

Does a day at the office mean working 9 to 5? Can the work be done remotely and on your own time? If you work well at night and need rapid responses to questions, is it a problem having a partner whose phone goes on “do not disturb” every evening at 7? Having the conversation and understanding expectations is key.

When Buckley started Happy Being, the team learned that one of the partners got up very early. “I had to tell him, ‘We don’t want 6 a.m. calls.’ ”

Do you like taking gambles?

A penchant for lottery tickets, Las Vegas gambling or high-adrenaline activities like skydiving shows a potential partner’s tolerance for risk and whether that aligns with your own. There will be countless decisions early on in a business concerning risk, and the partners need to be on the same page.

So ask about it. You go into the venture planning and hoping for success, but how much money or time is your partner willing to lose if it doesn’t succeed? How much of their parents’ or in-laws’ money would they bet on the partnership?

Is the business more important than the friendship?

Many business partners start as friends. But would you each be willing to give priority to making the right decision for the business, even if it means possibly hurting the friendship? Would you each be capable of letting the other one go if it was better for the company? Most advisers recommend choosing a partner who has a common business goal and letting the friendship build from that, rather than trying to build a partnership on top of a strong friendship.

“Your business partner will be one of your most intense relationships, but it shouldn’t fulfill every role in your life,” says Amy Jurkowitz, entrepreneur and co-founder of branding adviser Bread Ventures. “You need to be compatible in how much energy you will both put into the business.”

If the partnership doesn’t work out, how will it end?

A co-founder relationship is a binding agreement with financial and emotional repercussions, just like a marriage. But starting a business has the added stress of having the company—the baby—arrive on day one. If there is a divorce, who gets custody?

The more specific you can be about potential breakups, the better. If you are both putting capital in at the start, would you expect to get that out if you exited? What if, several years in, one partner can’t continue to struggle without a regular paycheck and leaves—and the next year the company finally turns a profit or is bought by another company? Would the partner who left get a share of the money?

These discussions should help make it clear that the survival of the company—and not the partnership or the friendship—is the ultimate goal. Those who have been through a business breakup recommend involving a third party to help sort through these issues at the outset.