 Don't miss out. Get your free copy of Dr. Guido Holtzman's How Inflation Destroys Civilization. Visit mises.org slash issues free. And we'll send you the book. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Minor Issues Podcast. I'm Mark Thornton at the Mises Institute. Well, despite the Fed's best hopes and the entire Wall Street gang in support of that hope, Wednesday's inflation report was a big disappointment. Our hunches here at the Minor Issues Podcast have been turning out better than the scientific forecast of the Federal Reserve and Wall Street. At the end of this episode, I will recap those hunches and come up with some new ones, or rather old but still future-oriented ones. The Consumer Price Index, a measure of goods and services prices across the economy rose at 3.5 percent in March from a year earlier and up from February's 3.2 percent. No matter how optimistic economists are trying to beat, their forecasts were once again off the mark. After a precipitous fall from 9 percent CPI inflation, it has hit a very stubborn and very disappointing stretch of nine months of 3-plus percent readings on its supposed way back down to the Fed's target of 2 percent. Even more disappointing is that core inflation is even more stubborn. This rate excludes volatile food and energy prices and applies to Americans who neither eat nor use fuel of any kind. Even more concerning, although largely unmentioned in the media, this means that food and energy prices, such as bread and gasoline, have been dragging down the CPI statistic for almost the last year. I wonder if the word volatile works in both directions. It would seem to me like it would, but that aspect of the issue has been largely ignored by the media. In other words, if energy prices, especially oil prices, continue to increase and if food prices start rising more rapidly than they already are, then the government's CPI statistic should start increasing above that 3-plus percent range of the last year. We know some food commodity prices like olive oil and chocolate have increased enormously recently. Oh, and orange juice too. And sugar too. Meanwhile, beef continues its relentless increase since 2003. Other prices, such as grains, have come down substantially since the Fed peaked two years ago. Eventually, food producers must buy food commodities to make food products. Even more troubling for the Fed, David Stockman reports, quote, in one step deeper, the so-called Supercore core CPI services without shelter index soared 0.7 percent month over month and up 5 percent year over year, the hottest since April 2023. Price inflation is not looking good, as we have been suggesting on several episodes of the Minor Issues podcast. The price of gold is at an all-time high. Silver is breaking out. All of the monetary and precious metals are doing at least OK. On the Minor Issues podcast, we have consistently cast doubt on Wall Street and Fed beliefs that CPI inflation would easily return to target, but rather than it would be a bumpy ride at best. We have also shown reasons why that could be the case and that the Fed has not been super tight. We also have been casting aspersions against the notion that the economy is healthy. And in addition to what we've already said over the last year, let us add that the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage is again approaching 7 percent after a short breather. And job creation in terms of full-time jobs has turned net negative. So unless you're an ambulance driver, the prospects are not nearly as bright as Wall Street and the Fed would lead you to believe. We have also been doubtful that the Fed would cut rates and that that would send the stock market ever higher and create even more jobs. The Fed itself has been channeling multiple interest rate cuts, and market pronosticators have been predicting six-rate cuts to justify their bullish projections and positions. So far, we have gone from a consensus of six cuts to four cuts to three cuts to two or three cuts down to one cut and now even no cuts. But the belief in a soft landing has never been higher. My best guess is where that price inflation would be sticky and therefore there could be no rate cuts in the current environment. That has now come to pass and all the pronosticators were wrong. Now that the pronosticators have paired back the cuts to zero cuts with a few still holding out for at least a couple of cuts, my best guess for the future is that the Fed will cut rates at least six times. This is actually an old guess where I thought the cuts would come at the juncture of the yield curve becoming uninverted at the same time stamp when the next official recession begins.