Tariff, a most beautiful word or inflation on a stick. I'm David Brancaccio. First, the last reading on

inflation before the election and the Fed's interest rate meeting next week is out this morning.

This is the central bank's preferred measure of inflation, personal consumption expenditures.

It is up 2.1% in a year using September's

numbers. With fuel and energy prices out of the way, the index was up 2.7% in a year. For more,

let's get an expert view from Diane Swank, chief economist at the audit tax and advisory firm,

KPMG. Morning. Good morning. Well, you couldn't make prices go down,

which is what people actually want, but inflation looks pretty tame. This inflation number was

better than expected, rose 0.2% after a slight uptick from the 0.1% pace of August, but year on year,

2.09, we're now, you know, going out to those two decimal

places. That's about as close to 2% the Fed's target as we've been since inflation started

to accelerate in early 2021. Again, a movement in the right direction for the Federal Reserve.

We will see the Fed cutting rates again next week.

Now, we also got a quarterly reading on what employers are paying the employees. But part of that is how much the employees are getting done, productivity.

Exactly. And what we saw on that was it moved down from 4.1% to 3.9%. Again, a cooling of costs, which is very important for the Fed and what happens going forward with inflation. So this should give the Federal Reserve some more confidence in how the economy is performing. And I think that's very important.

Another big economic release prior to the election

and the Fed meeting will be the hiring and unemployment reports for October. They come out tomorrow.

Diane, you and I were talking. What's your rule of thumb here for tomorrow?

Well, this one is one that we have to sort of put on the shelf and not look at too closely because

there's going to be a lot of noise.

Everything from hurricanes to strikes in the aerospace industry and the spillover effects of all those things will distort our data unemployment.

So that's not going to be as helpful for us or for the Fed as they go into their November meeting next week.

...