The core personal-consumption expenditures price index rose by 3.3% in June from a year earlier, according to the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis, falling inside a range of Journal historical forecasts for the indicator.
The 3.3% year-over-year increase in the core personal-consumption expenditures price index, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, was in line with expectations of economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal.
For select economic indicators, including the core PCE report, Dow Jones Newswires measures whether a reported statistic falls outside a historical range of WSJ forecasting, and if so, by how much. Those forecast ranges are based on an archive of surveys of economists the Journal has conducted in recent years.
The gauge provides a way to measure the relative volatility of any one particular indicator, compared not just with a contemporary forecast in the days ahead of an indicator's release, but also compared with its track record surprising forecasters over time.
In the case of the June core PCE report the range of WSJ forecasts relative to the actual reported number was plus or minus 0.1 percentage point.
The range for core PCE year-on-year is made up of the median of historical forecasts over seven years that came in lower than the reported number and the median of forecasts that came in higher.
The PCE reading is often close to expectations because economists can use other official data published earlier about the month to forecast PCE inflation with great accuracy.
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