Well, let's see. What has this economy brought to us this week?

Hmm? From American Public Media. This is Marketplace.

In Los Angeles, I'm Colin Risdahl. It is Friday. Today, 16 May. Good as always to have you along, everybody.

So what would you like to talk about today? Inflation? Consumers? Tariffs, maybe.

Ah, never mind. Trick question. We're going to talk about all three.

Courtney Brown is at Axios. Rachel Siegel is at the Washington Post. Hey, you two. Hi, Kai. Rachel Siegel, let me start with you. Sorry, I was having a minute making up my mind there. Who I was going to start with? I would like to start with inflation, Rachel. I would like to point out that the CPI and the PPI this week,

the Consumer Price Index and the Producer Price Index,

both came in pretty good, but the

observation here has to be made that this is all lagging data. Discuss. Yeah, I don't want to be

a downer because it is true that these reports came in softer than expected. And that was even when we were

getting all of this sense and anecdotes from across the country that tariffs were already starting

to raise prices. So we may be expected to see a little bit more of that. Unfortunately, though,

I think the real tell will be in the May report, which will come out next month, that will give a

little bit more of a comprehensive picture over whether those price hikes really stuck, whether they were cumulative enough across goods and services to show up in the data. So I think it's a little too soon to say that this report from this week, therefore said that tariffs aren't going to raise inflation, but if we check it again next month, I think we'll have a clearer picture. Courtney, let me ask you this. Actually, I need to tell you a quick story.

So we all around here on Fed Presser days, sit around and watch and figure out what we're going

to say to the people about what Jay Powell said. And so we were all watching when you, sort of late

in Chair Powell's most recent press conference, asked him a question about hard data versus soft data.

And you said, in essence, look, the soft data has been lousy for a while.

Why do you have to wait for the hard data?

Why?

Why does that matter for the Fed?

Okay.

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