A price index with an honest gap

At 08:30 in Washington, 14:30 in Berlin, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes the consumer price index for October, together with real earnings for the same month¹. Everyone has a number ready for it. What almost nobody has is the number people usually quote first: the change on a year earlier. This month it will not be there.

The reason is a year old. During the government shutdown in October 2025, the bureau did not collect prices, so there is no October 2025 index to compare against, and the BLS “can’t calculate and will not release” the year-on-year rate this month, Kiplinger reports². Wells Fargo’s economists put it plainly: the missing annual rate “will put an even bigger spotlight on the month-over-month changes”².

That is the dull machinery at its best. A statistics office could have patched the gap with an estimate and printed a tidy headline. It is choosing to publish what it measured and to say what it did not. You may find that annoying at 14:31. You should find it reassuring by 14:35.

What the forecasters have pencilled in. Economists in a Dow Jones survey expect headline prices to have risen 0.3% in October and core prices, without food and energy, 0.2%, after 0.6% and 0.3% in September³. Kiplinger quotes the Bloomberg consensus for the headline at 0.29%². The individual calls are close together but not identical: Wells Fargo estimates 0.28% headline and 0.21% core; UBS 0.26% and 0.23%; Barclays 0.2% for both; RBC 0.3% for both². The common thread is petrol. UBS expects energy goods to add only 0.04 percentage points to the October figure, after 0.39 points in September².

Desk arithmetic: a 0.3% rise, if it repeated for twelve months, would compound to about 3.7% a year; a 0.2% rise to about 2.4%. That is not a forecast, only a way to translate a monthly figure into the unit you are used to.

The annual number, by other means. Some forecasters have built their own bridge over the hole. BMO’s Sal Gautieri writes that, using the average of the September and November 2025 indexes, the yearly increase would rise to 3.9% from September’s 3.7%, and core to 2.7% from 2.6%². Treat that as what it is: one bank’s workaround, clearly labelled, not the official rate. UBS adds a warning for the months ahead: because of how the BLS handled last year’s shutdown, 12-month changes in housing rents carry an upward bias between October and March². A thermometer with a known error is still a thermometer, as long as you know the error.

Who is reading it. The Federal Reserve raised rates in mid-September for the first time in three years, then paused in late October, saying inflation “remains elevated”². Its next decision is due on Wednesday 9 December². Barclays, Wells Fargo and BMO all say they expect another rise in December, and Barclays reads October’s statement and its two dissents as setting one up². That is their view, and a single calm month will not settle it: BMO’s Gautieri writes that the committee “won’t take much comfort from just one calm CPI report”².

Tokyo is reading too. The Bank of Japan’s summary of its 29–30 October meeting, released this morning, quoted one of the nine board members saying the bank “should decide on the next policy interest rate hike when it is possible without becoming overly cautious”; Bloomberg reads the summary as a good chance of a December move⁵.

Your money this morning. Markets have spent the night in a better mood. Brent was 0.9% lower at $91.74 a barrel early on Tuesday⁴, after settling at $92.57 on Monday³. The euro was at $1.1222, down from $1.1266, and the dollar at 158.06 yen⁴. Gold futures were 0.22% higher at $4,123.50 an ounce³. None of these prices knows what 14:30 will say.

What to do with it. If you hold dollars, a dollar mortgage, or simply a view, read the monthly figures first, then the core, then the energy line. Ignore any headline that quotes an annual rate for October as if the bureau had published one; it will not have². Producer prices for October follow on Friday at the same hour¹.

The quiet virtue here is not in any forecast. It is in a calendar kept, a release published on time, and a gap admitted rather than plastered over. Nothing here is investment advice.