Oh, look, more inflation from American public media.

This is Marketplace.

In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Rizdahl.

It is Wednesday. Today, this one is the 13th of May. Good as always to have you along, everybody.

So, you remember yesterday the big inflation news? Consumer prices rising 3.8% year on year.

Oh, for the halcyon days of 24 hours ago. We learned this morning from the Good People at the Bureau of Labor Statistics that producer prices, that is prices at the wholesale level, shot up 6% in April from a year ago. The March to April increase this year was 1.4%.

We haven't seen numbers like that since 2022 during those post-pandemic inflation blues.

It is not, to be clear, a one-for-one correlation wholesale prices trickling down to the consumer,

but it is a real safe bet that higher prices at retail are coming our way.

Marketplaces Kelly Wells gets us going.

When Laura Veldcamp saw the numbers this morning, the word that came out of her mouth was,

wow.

That's a large rise in prices.

She's an economics and finance professor at Columbia University. The reason for the

wow is these are price hikes that we as consumers haven't even seen yet. This is above and beyond

what we've already felt at the gas pump or on the shelf of the store. The cause of that jump in

prices? You get one guess. This seems directly related to the war in the store. The cause of that jump in prices, you get one guess.

This seems directly related to the war in the Middle East, to the disruption in the fuel supply.

Diesel's up 13 percent, gas is up 16 percent, and that's a problem.

Some of these higher energy prices are starting to feed into, you know, other goods and services prices.

Grace Zwemer with Oxford Economics says some of those other prices are obvious.

Trucking, freight, passenger transportation, but energy spikes also sneak into grocery prices, too.

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