US Inflation Retreats in March

The March consumer price index in US dropped by -0.3%.  That’s unusual and a decline in CPI has not happened since February 2016.  The reason was volatile gas prices but America finally is catching a break on cell phone service costs too economicpopulist.org reported.  The gasoline index by itself dropped -6.2% for the month.  The bigger surprise is inflation without food and energy prices considered dropped by -0.1%. That hasn’t happened since 2010. Yearly overall inflation was 2.4%, much less than last month’s 2.7% increase. For the past decade the annualized inflation rate has been 1.9%.  Core inflation is the figure the Federal Reserve considers for interest rate increase decisions.