Stock market investors will be closely watching Wednesday’s U.S. April inflation report as a significant deviation from forecasts may cause losses for those expecting the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates unchanged at its next meeting and potentially cut rates later this year as its year-long monetary tightening cycle ends.
“We expect another rough inflation print in the April CPI report, with a sequential jump in the headline and little to no month-on-month improvement in the core,” said a team of economists led by Carl Riccadonna, chief U.S. economist at BNP Paribas. What concerns investors is that inflation is only slowly retreating from the 40-year high seen in the past year which makes it too early for the Fed to change its policy. Chair Powell said in his press conference last week that the process of getting inflation back down to 2% “has a long way to go,” while reiterating that future data will determine whether more interest rate increases are needed.
“Inflation numbers are going to be really important to confirming or denying what the market seems to be thinking,” she told MarketWatch in a phone interview on Tuesday. “[If] CPI report comes in lower than it has been, that would probably be good news – it would confirm that the Fed doesn’t need to increase rates anymore.”