Amna Nawaz:
The report was the first from the Bureau of Labor Statistics since President Trump fired its commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, earlier this month, accusing her without evidence of rigging economic data.
That firing came just hours after the release of a weaker-than-expected jobs report. Late yesterday, the president nominated her replacement, E.J. Antoni, chief economist at The Heritage Foundation. That’s a conservative think tank.
For more now, we are joined by Michael Strain. He’s the director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
Michael, thanks for joining us.
Let’s just start off with these new inflation numbers, overall inflation holding steady. It was helped, we should note, by drops in gas and energy prices. But the fact that core inflation did tick up, how do you look at that? What’s behind it? And what does it say about the overall economy right now?