The index is now up 2.3 percent over the last year excluding food and energy, suggesting<br />that inflation is now in the ballpark of the 2 percent mark that the Federal Reserve aims for (the Fed focuses on a different inflation number that still shows readings below 2 percent).<br />And while overall industrial production fell 0.3 percent in January, according to new Fed data,<br />that was only because the warm winter depressed energy demand and thus output by utilities.<br />To cap off a day of good data pointing to an economic surge, the Federal Reserve Bank of<br />New York said its survey of business activity soared to its highest level in two years<br />The Consumer Price Index rose 0.6 percent, the Labor Department said; even excluding volatile food and energy, it was up 0.3 percent.<br />It may not be as dramatic as the torrent of political news out of Washington; an improving economy, after all, announces itself through a series of data releases<br />that are just a little bit better than people were expecting.<br />An unusually warm winter is probably a factor in some of the good numbers, as people<br />who in a normal year would have hunkered down amid snowstorms instead went shopping.<br />Similarly, the effects of a steep run-up in the value of the dollar from 2014 to early 2015 have now worked their way through the economy<br />and aren’t holding back manufacturing the way they once were.
