New York Federal Reserve President John Williams said Friday that “technical factors” likely distorted November’s inflation data, pushing the headline reading lower than it otherwise would have been.
“There were some special factors of practical factors that really are related to the fact that they weren’t able to collect date in October and not in the first half of November. And because of that, I think the data were distorted in some of the categories, and that pushed down the CPI reading, probably by a tenth or so,” Williams said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
“It’s hard to know, we’ll get some when we’ll get to December date, I think we’ll get a better reading of how much that distortion, how big the effect was, but I do think that that was pushed down a bit by these technical factors,” he added.
The consumer price index rose at a 2.7% annualized rate last month, a delayed report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed. Economists polled by Dow Jones expected the CPI to have risen 3.1%.
Williams said the data may have a downward bias because it was collected mainly in the second half of November, when sales were widespread, and noted there were also complications with rent and other categories.
