Wholesale Price Gains Hint at Muted Rise in Fed’s Preferred Inflation Gauge

Higher energy and food costs lifted wholesale prices in September, the Labor Department said Tuesday, though certain items that feed into the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation metric are likely to leave that reading little changed from recent months.

After declining by 0.1% in August, prices charged by producers rose by 0.3% in September, in line with economists’ expectations. The producer-price index tends to be more volatile than the prices that consumers see in stores and online.