Prof G Markets · Wednesday, July 15, 2026
Mark Zandi, Chief Economist at Moody's Analytics, stated that despite a recent drop, underlying US inflation remains uncomfortably high, hovering between 3% and 3.5%. He noted that the latest inflation report contained significant 'noise' and anomalies, making it difficult to draw firm conclusions.
“Mark, great to see you, thanks for joining us on the show. Inflation's come down, we were at 4.2, which was really high, now down to 3.5, still pretty high, but lower than expected.”
“Yeah, it's uh I'd when you said inflation is easing to 3.5%, you know, that uh it is easing, it's down, but you know, it's still awfully high, uncomfortably high, and, you know, as everyone knows, the Fed's target what is it is 2% inflation, that's kind of what we take as being a comfortable rate of inflation.”
“And I think underlying inflation, kind of abstracting from all the vagaries of the data, and by the way, in this report, there was a lot of noise. I don't know if you noticed, but it was a very noisy report. And, you know, a lot of anomalies in the data and I'm not sure how much to read into it.”
“But, you know, abstracting from that, you know, underlying inflation is kind of three to three and a half percent, somewhere in there. Again, uncomfortably high.”