April inflation comes in hotter than expected: CPI data breakdown

Prices rose 0.6% month over month and 3.8% year over year in April, according to the latest Consumer Price Index (CPI) survey. Core CPI — which excludes food and energy costs — rose 0.4% monthly and 2.8% yearly.

Yahoo Finance's Julie Hyman and Myles Udland take a closer look at the breaking numbers.

00:00 Speaker A

0.6% is the month-over-month increase in the Consumer Price Index. Um the core number is up 4/10 of 1%, which is a 10th percent hotter than estimated and year-over-year up 3.8% headline. That is also hotter and a significant uptick from the 3.3% um in March and finally core CPI year over year up 2.8%. So again just running through these numbers

00:31 Speaker A

uh CPI consumer inflation month over month rising 6/10 of 1%. You back out food and energy, you get an increase of 0.4%. Year over year, a tick up of 3.8%. um or on a core basis up 2.8%. So indeed seeing some heat in these numbers. Of course, we'll, you know, as we always do, we go into the release, we try to see where exactly all of this was showing up to get an idea of of whether how much we can look.

01:08 Speaker B

Yeah, let's just do some of those categories super quick before we get to our panel. Energy costs up 3.8% in the month of April. So that's compared just to the prior month when we saw a 10.9% increase in the energy index in March. So it's 17.9% annual increase in April in the energy index. Energy commodities, so there's your oil prices up 29.2%. Uh energy, let me look at fuel oil, up 54.3% as we were just discussing. The byproduct breakdown within energy and there's further detail further down in the report that we'll get to later on um in the programming today. But again, fuel oil up 54.3% year-over-year, up 5.8% in April. All three components of the energy index, so energy commodities, gasoline, fuel oil, each up more than 5% month-on-month in April.

02:00 Speaker A

Yeah, and and shelter which we were just talking about uh rising 6/10 of 1% on a month over month basis. That is a doubling of the gain that we saw the prior month and so that there is that sort of wonky distortion a number that we got. But looking at some of the other things, apparel up 6/10 of 1% and I was reading a number of economists commentaries going into this that saying that we would start to see a sort of tariff roll off effect, lapping effect, if you will. Um so we'll dig more into the numbers and see what all that looks like.

02:30 Speaker B

We will.