Carson's statistics, based on 178 PCE sub-items, show that 54% of these items saw year-over-year increases exceeding 3% in July, higher than 47% a year ago and 24% at the end of 2019. This is the diffusion rate calculated by the number of items, not the inflation rate calculated by weighting consumption; the 178 items are derived from the Dallas Fed's PCE sub-item system.
Therefore, the official core PCE remaining at 3.3% can be simultaneously confirmed by the expansion of the price increase range: some high-weighted items cooled down, suppressing the average, but many more sub-categories continued to rise rapidly. The Dallas Fed's July cutoff mean PCE was 2.3%, also indicating that the deterioration in the breadth of inflation has not yet fully translated into an acceleration in the weighted indicator.
