BLS Will Not Publish 12-Month CPI, Core CPI Figures For October

The Bureau of Labor Statistics will not publish the 12-month percent change for headline CPI or core CPI in its October report this week, Bloomberg reports. That strips out the figure traders lean on most when judging where inflation stands relative to the Federal Reserve's goals.

The 12-month change is the standard annual read in the BLS release, the number that headlines screens and anchors rate-path models. With it absent from the October report, the usual shorthand for "is inflation cooling or reheating" disappears from the primary document.

Interpretation: the missing annual figures widen the gap between what the market can verify and what it must estimate. Desks will likely build their own year-over-year approximations from the index levels and prior-year data, and different methods can produce different results. That dispersion could show up as sloppier price discovery around the release, particularly in rate-sensitive assets that normally react to a clean headline number.

The omission also hits both headline and core readings, so there's no fallback metric inside the report to cross-check against. Core CPI in particular is the gauge many participants use to filter out food and energy noise when handicapping Fed policy.