The Donald Trump mega donor who's also making in-kind contributions of his skills.

I'm David Brancaccio in New York.

The last official report on inflation before the election and the Fed's next interest rate meeting is

coming tomorrow it's the one with a turgid title but taken very seriously by the

official guardians of interest rates it's the personal consumption expenditures price index. In August it was up 2.2% year over year.

That's very close to what the experts regard as ideal.

Marketplace's Stephanie Hughes reports.

This could be the week when inflation hits the Fed's sweet spot, 2%.

You know, we're getting back to where we should be.

Alan Detmeister is an economist for UBS who used to work for the Fed.

He expects the PCE price index for September to come in around 2.1, maybe 2%, and says that's

largely due to recent declines in energy prices, specifically gasoline.

But he says that 2% don't get used to it.

We're expecting it to bounce back up over the next handful of months. That's because Detmeister doesn't expect energy prices to keep falling the way they have been.

But he believes the overall trajectory of inflation is on track.

And Melinda Roman, a professor of economics at St. Mary's University in San Antonio, Texas, says that's the good news.

The maybe not so good news is what's inside of it.

If you look at the makeup of the most recent PCE price index, you can see that in August, prices

for services were up nearly 4% over last year.

A lot of that's due to housing, where prices have been slow to come down. Also services tend to require a lot of

labor and after a few years of a tight job market in many service sectors, wages have gone up.

And Vermont says wages? They tend to be sticky. have gone up. And Raman says, Wages?

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