2003-02 PAER

June’s CPI and PPI both cooled, and the cooling reaches all the way back to Stage 1 — consistent with a genuine, if possibly temporary, easing of the energy shock rather than a one-month statistical blip. But most of the movement inside the food basket this month — dairy’s reversal, the citrus and lettuce climate stories, the tomato tariff baseline, Brazil’s coffee cycle, and the beef–pork divergence — traces to category-specific supply and policy dynamics that would be happening with or without the conflict.

The May 2026 CPI and PPI data, read together, tell a coherent and analytically arresting story: quiet at the shelf, loading at record rates upstream.