The index is now up 2.3 percent over the last year excluding food and energy, suggesting
that inflation is now in the ballpark of the 2 percent mark that the Federal Reserve aims for (the Fed focuses on a different inflation number that still shows readings below 2 percent).
And while overall industrial production fell 0.3 percent in January, according to new Fed data,
that was only because the warm winter depressed energy demand and thus output by utilities.
To cap off a day of good data pointing to an economic surge, the Federal Reserve Bank of
New York said its survey of business activity soared to its highest level in two years
The Consumer Price Index rose 0.6 percent, the Labor Department said; even excluding volatile food and energy, it was up 0.3 percent.
It may not be as dramatic as the torrent of political news out of Washington; an improving economy, after all, announces itself through a series of data releases
that are just a little bit better than people were expecting.
An unusually warm winter is probably a factor in some of the good numbers, as people
who in a normal year would have hunkered down amid snowstorms instead went shopping.
Similarly, the effects of a steep run-up in the value of the dollar from 2014 to early 2015 have now worked their way through the economy
and aren’t holding back manufacturing the way they once were.