Print-day breakdowns of every CPI release: the actual against every graded forecaster, the components that drove it, and what the daily gauge saw coming. Written from the engine's own graded database on release morning, reviewed and published by Steven Fiorillo the same day. Latest report:
2026-07 print day · By Steven Fiorillo
The BLS printed July CPI at 3.4% YoY this morning, right on the nose of Street consensus at 3.4% and down a tenth from June's 3.5%. Zero surprise on the headline. Core cooled too — 2.5% versus 2.6% prior — continuing the grind lower that started earlier this year. No fireworks in the print itself. The real story, as usual, is in what my gauge was telling me going into this release.
My FMC Daily Inflation Engine closed the morning of the print at 1.895% YoY on an index level of 134.34 — a full 1.5 percentage points below the official 3.4% clip. That's not a rounding error, and it's not noise. It's the 41st time since I started tracking this exact signal (gap ≤ -0.5pp between my daily gauge and trailing official CPI) that this rule has fired. History says something: in 23 of those 41 prior instances — a 56% hit rate — official CPI fell three months later. I'm not calling that a coin flip I'm ignoring. A gap this wide, sitting at -1.5pp, is leaning hard toward more disinflation ahead, not less.
Look under the hood of the official print and the story is energy and services, full stop:
Shelter (owned + rent combined) is still doing the heaviest lifting in this basket, but energy remains the marginal mover day-to-day, which is exactly why my daily gauge — built on Zillow rents, AAA pump prices, and Manheim wholesale data — keeps front-running the print.
Every forecaster gets graded, every month, no exceptions:
| Forecaster | Forecast | Actual | Abs Error | |---|---|---|---| | Street Consensus | 3.40 | 3.4 | 0.000 | | Cleveland Fed | 3.42 | 3.4 | 0.020 | | FMC Ensemble | 3.421 | 3.4 | 0.021 | | Kalshi Implied | 3.347 | 3.4 | 0.053 | | In-House | 3.46 | 3.4 | 0.060 |
Street takes the belt this month with a dead-on call. My ensemble landed a hair behind Cleveland Fed, both clustered tight around the actual. Kalshi's market-implied price undershot by 5.3 bps — the crowd got greedy on disinflation. My in-house discretionary read was the laggard this round. Over the full 86-print sample, my ensemble's MAE sits at 0.161 versus 0.329 for a naive random-walk model — roughly half the error, month after month. That's the track record I'm putting on the line every print.
Going into the September 11 release for August 2026 CPI, the early reads are: Cleveland Fed at 3.42, Kalshi implied at 3.399, and my FMC ensemble at 3.357 — the lowest of the three. Combined with a -1.5pp gauge gap that's historically preceded further cooling, I'm positioning for another soft print, not a reacceleration. Anyone calling for CPI to reheat here is fighting both my daily data and the historical base rate.
Pump prices sat at $4.036 as of today, but my 2-week forward model — pump plus 0.85x the RBOB 5-day vs. prior-15-day spread — points to $3.838, a drop of nearly 20 cents. RBOB's 5-day average of $3.0165 versus the prior 15-day average of $3.2495 is the tell: futures are already pricing in relief at the pump, and that flows straight into next month's energy contribution before BLS ever touches it.
The tape says cooling. My gauge said it first. Subscribe and watch the channel — I grade every forecaster, every month, so you know whose numbers to trust before the headline hits.
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