Report: April 2022 Inflation Was Worse Than Expected

The inflation crisis continued to worsen in April, according to new data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Wednesday.

“The consumer price index, a broad-based measure of prices for goods and services, increased 8.3% from a year ago, higher than the Dow Jones estimate for an 8.1% gain,” CNBC reported. “That represented a slight ease from March’s peak but was still close to the highest level since the summer of 1982.”

According to the new CPI report, inflation “increased 0.3 percent in April on a seasonally adjusted basis after rising 1.2 percent in March… The all items index increased 8.3 percent for the 12 months ending April, a smaller increase than the 8.5-percent figure for the period ending in March. The all items less food and energy index rose 6.2 percent over the last 12 months. The energy index rose 30.3 percent over the last year, and the food index increased 9.4 percent, the largest 12-month increase since the period ending April 1981.”

Due to the rising inflation rate, the real wages of American workers continued to fall over the last year. According to a separate report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the “Real average hourly earnings decreased 2.6 percent, seasonally adjusted, from April 2021 to April 2022. The change in real average hourly earnings combined with a decrease of 0.9 percent in the average workweek resulted in a 3.4-percent decrease in real average weekly earnings over this period.”

As noted by CNBC, “Markets had been looking for signs that March’s 8.5% CPI reading would mark the peak in pandemic-era inflation.”

However, the new April report showed that “this is another upward inflation surprise and suggests that the deceleration is going to be painstakingly slow,” said Seema Shah, chief strategist at Principal Global Investors, according to CNBC.