Finance

The consumer price index rose 2.4% on an annual basis in May 2025, up from 2.3% in April, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Inflation trends are largely encouraging under the surface, and roughly back to the Federal Reserve’s target level, economists said.
However, President Trump’s tariff policy is likely to cause a reacceleration of inflation in coming months, economists said.

David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The annual inflation rate increased slightly in May as an uptick in grocery inflation somewhat offset lower prices at the gasoline pump.
And while inflation was relatively tame, economists said they expect President Trump’s tariff policy to raise consumer prices in coming months — and that there was already some evidence of their impact.

The consumer price index, an inflation barometer, rose 2.4% in the 12 months through May, up from 2.3% in April, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said Wednesday.

‘Calm before the inflation storm’

That increase to the annual inflation rate was largely due to a data quirk called “base effects,” economists said. (Basically, inflation one year prior, in May 2024, was unusually low, making the May 2025 numbers look high by comparison.)
The monthly inflation rate paints a rosier picture and gives a better indicator of underlying trends, economists said: CPI increased 0.1% from April to May, down from 0.2% the prior month, the BLS said.

A consistent monthly rate around 0.2% would generally be adequate to bring inflation down to the Federal Reserve’s long-term target, economists said.
“It was a very good report,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s. “Basically, it says inflation has finally gotten back to the Federal Reserve’s annual inflation target.”

However, tariffs President Trump levied on many countries and products will likely start to show up noticeably into the summer and fall, he said.
“I think it’s the calm before the inflation storm,” Zandi said. “This [report] still reflects the disinflation that began a few years ago and continued on through the month of May.”

Tariff impact on energy prices

That said, tariffs already had some impact on consumer prices in May, economists said.
For one, gasoline prices fell almost 3% from April to May, according to the BLS. They’re down 12% from a year ago, it said.
This is largely the result of falling oil prices, which reflect concerns about a slowdown in global economic growth due to tariffs, said Bernard Yaros, lead U.S. economist at Oxford Economics.

Lower energy prices filter down to the gasoline pump and lower household bills, he said. Lower oil prices also feed through more broadly to reduced costs for transportation, in categories like airline fares, Zandi said.
Airfare fell about 3% from April to May and is down 7% for the year, the BLS said.
Grocery prices were a sticking point in May, though, economists said. Inflation for food at home rose by 0.3% for the month, after having deflated 0.4% the prior month.
Food prices give “a little bit of a queasy feeling,” Zandi said. It’s one of the categories he’s most concerned about, he said.

Other disinflationary factors

Healing supply chains and a weakening of the labor market are factors that have helped rein in U.S. inflation broadly, said Sarah House, a senior economist at Wells Fargo Economics.
Data indicate consumers are continuing to spend money and haven’t shown much reluctance to accept higher prices, House said.
“The consumer hasn’t buckled yet,” she said.

Housing inflation has also moderated, an important element since the category is the largest component of the consumer price index, economists said.
Indeed, monthly inflation for rent and “owners’ equivalent rent” (a rent measure applied to homeowners) have “returned to their pre-pandemic norms,” Stephen Brown, deputy chief North America economist at Capital Economics, wrote in a research note Wednesday.
These trends together signaled “a steady downtrend in inflation” back to the Fed’s long-term target at least by the end of this year or early next year, Oxford Economics’ Yaros said.

Tariff risk ‘stalling out’ disinflation

Tariffs complicate that narrative, economists said.
“The disinflationary trend we’ve been seeing in fits and starts is at risk of stalling out again,” House said.
President Trump has levied a barrage of import duties since his inauguration in January.
Federal data show the effective tariff rate in April was about 6% — and is likely to increase — relative to 2% at end of 2024, House said.
The Yale Budget Lab estimates the average U.S. household would pay about $2,500 more in 2025 due to tariff policy in effect as of June 1.

There were some early signs of tariff impacts in the May CPI report for people “looking through a microscope,” Brown wrote.
For example, major appliance prices jumped 4.3% for the month, and toy prices by 2.2%, he wrote, citing CPI data.
“Unless all retailers are raising prices at the same time, it may trickle not flood into the data,” Elizabeth Renter, senior economist at NerdWallet, wrote Wednesday. More

The U.S. and China have reached consensus on trade, representatives from both sides said after high-level talks in London.
The negotiators will now seek approval on the framework from the U.S. and Chinese presidents, before implementing it.
The talks follow a breakthrough trade agreement reached in mid-May that paused new tariffs for 90 days.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick speaks to members of the media while arriving for trade talks at Lancaster House in London, UK, on Tuesday, June 10, 2025.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The U.S. and China have reached an agreement on trade, representatives from both sides said following a second day of high-level talks in London.
“We have reached a framework to implement the Geneva consensus and the call between the two presidents,” U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told reporters.

That echoed comments to reporters from Li Chenggang, China’s international trade representative and a vice minister at China’s Commerce Ministry.
U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke by phone late last week, stabilizing what had become a fraught relationship with both countries accusing each other of violating the Geneva trade agreement. At a meeting in Switzerland in mid-May, the world’s two largest economies had agreed to a 90-day suspension of reciprocal tariffs added in April, and a rollback of certain other measures.
Lutnick said he and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer will head back to Washington, D.C., to “make sure President Trump approves” the framework. If Xi also approves it, then “we will implement the framework,” Lutnick said.
Chinese restrictions on rare-earth exports to the U.S. are a “fundamental part” of the latest agreement and the U.S. expects the issue “will be resolved in this framework implementation,” Lutnick said.
He indicated U.S. restrictions on sales of advanced tech to China in recent weeks would be rolled back as Beijing approves rare earths exports.

While Chinese state media had been quick to announce Xi’s call with Trump last week, Beijing’s official mouthpieces were conspicuously silent more than one hour after Lutnick’s comments. The latest state media report from Tuesday night focused on how U.S.-China talks continued following lunchtime local time.
A headline from the state-backed China News Service at 8:35 a.m. Beijing time Wednesday said, without elaborating, that the “result of the talks is beneficial for taking a step toward increasing trust between China and the U.S.” That’s according to a CNBC translation of the Chinese.
On Tuesday local time in London, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters he was headed back to the U.S. in order to testify before Congress.
Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng, the lead negotiator on trade talks with the U.S., and Chinese Minister of Commerce Wang Wentao also participated in this week’s discussions. More

Jeffrey Gundlach speaking at the 2019 Sohn Conference in New York on May 6, 2019.
Adam Jeffery | CNBC

DoubleLine Capital CEO Jeffrey Gundlach said Tuesday that international stocks will continue to outshine U.S. equities on the back of what he believes to be the dollar’s secular downtrend.
“I think the trade is to not own U.S. stocks, but to own stocks in the rest of the world. It’s certainly working,” Gundlach said in an investor webcast. “The dollar is now in what I think is the beginning of [a] secular decline.”

Gundlach, whose firm managed about $95 billion at the end of 2024, said dollar-based investors who buy foreign stocks could enjoy “a double barreled wind” if the greenback declines against foreign currencies and international equities outperform.
The dollar has weakened in 2025 as Trump’s aggressive trade policies dented sentiment toward U.S. assets and triggered a reevaluation of the greenback’s dominant role in global commerce. The ICE U.S. Dollar Index is down about 8% this year.
“I think it’s perfectly sensible to invest in a few emerging market countries, and I would still rather choose India as the long term hold there,” Gundlach said. “But there’s nothing wrong with certain Southeast Asian countries, or perhaps even Mexico and Latin America.”
The widely-followed investor noted that foreigners invested in the United States could also be holding back committing additional capital due to heightened geopolitical tensions, and that could create another tailwind for international markets.
“If that’s reversing, then there’s a lot of selling that can happen. And this is one of the reasons that I advocate ex U.S. stocks versus U.S. stocks,” he said.

The investor has been negative on the U.S. markets and economy for some time, saying a number of recession indicators are starting to “blink red.”
Gundlach predicted that the Federal Reserve will stay put on interest rates at its policy meeting next week even as current inflation is “quite low.”
He estimated that inflation is likely to end 2025 at roughly 3%, although he acknowledged the difficulty in predicting future price pressures due to the lack of clarity in President Donald Trump’s tariff policy. More

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has sent a clear message to investors: The world’s largest asset manager’s smallest acquisition last year could end up its most consequential. During an industry conference in March, the longtime executive said BlackRock’s $3.2 billion purchase of alternative assets data provider Preqin — the smallest of its three private-market deals announced in 2024 — is “probably the most significant thing we have done in terms of expanding the profile of private markets.” It could be a big deal for investors, too. For starters, Preqin can bring what BlackRock currently does best — offer investors index products like exchange-traded funds (ETF) for public markets — to the opaque world of private markets. That would add revenue and earnings diversification that’s less tied to the daily fluctuations of the stock and bond markets, BlackRock CFO Martin Small said when announcing the deal in July 2024. “Through strong organic growth and scaling of our private markets and investment technology platforms, both of which fuel stable earnings growth,” Small added. “We believe we can drive multiple expansion for our shareholders.” BLK YTD mountain BlackRock (BLK) year-to-date performance The acquisition, which closed on March 3 , integrates Preqin’s private markets data into BlackRock platforms such as its portfolio management system Aladdin and investment software eFront. This gives BlackRock clients – mostly institutional investors who pay for access to these platforms – more visibility into non-public investment areas like infrastructure, private equity, private credit, and more. They will get valuation and performance data on more than 190,000 funds and 60,000 managers, according to BlackRock. “Preqin effectively does for private markets what Zillow did for housing,” CEO Fink said in his 2025 annual chairman letter . “If you’re buying a home, you want to know if you’re paying a fair price, and there are ways to do that. You can check neighborhood benchmarks, recent sales, or historical appreciation trends; companies like Zillow have made this simple. But today, investing in private markets feels a bit like buying a house in an unfamiliar neighborhood before Zillow existed, where finding accurate prices was difficult or impossible.” “This lack of transparency discourages investment,” he added. The new venture could take some of the pressure off BlackRock’s index business, which manages trillions of dollars and makes up a significant portion of its overall revenues. Although the firm has profited immensely as a traditional asset manager and has become an industry leader for ETFs, the division’s revenue streams are still at the mercy of the stock market’s volatility. BlackRock also has to pay fees to third-party providers like S & P Global and MSCI to use their underlying data in BlackRock funds. The longer-term goal is for BlackRock to create its own private-market benchmarks and sell more accessible private index products. Fink has also said private market investments could play a role within retirement accounts like IRAs, touting them as offering higher returns. “Not that we’re making a pivot, we just see the blending of public and private markets coming together and [it’s] probably happening faster than I ever envisioned,” Fink said at RBC Global Financial Institutions Conference in March. There are signs that the Preqin deal is already starting to pay off. Preqin added roughly $20 million to first-quarter revenue — even though it was owned for less than a third of the period — and contributed to the firm’s 30% year-over-year increase in annual contract values, or ACV, Small said during the company’s April earnings call. The CFO said this new “growth reflects sustained demand” from Preqin and that the trend shouldn’t die down anytime time. “We remain committed to low to mid-teens ACV growth over the long term,” he said. ACV is a financial metric that represents the average annual revenue from a customer contract. Offering retail investors access to private market investments doesn’t come without risk. Moody’s has warned that selling funds to retail investors could result in “reputation loss, heightened regulatory scrutiny and higher costs” for asset managers, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. “If growth outpaces the industry’s ability to manage such complexities, such challenges could have systemic consequences,” Moody’s analysts wrote. However, in his annual chairman letter, Fink wrote that “private markets don’t have to be as risky. Or opaque. Or out of reach.” He added: “Not if the investment industry is willing to innovate—and that’s exactly what we’ve spent the past year doing at BlackRock.” There’s more to like about the Preqin acquisition. The deal should attract more clients and deepen its existing relationships. The competition for private markets data providers is limited, and Preqin has one of the most comprehensive data sets available. That could result in more valuable contracts with its existing clients and an increase in sales. We see this in the impact of similar acquisitions on BlackRock’s financials. Since BlackRock’s eFront acquisition in 2019, for example, BlackRock has doubled the annual contract value of the business. As these BlackRock platforms get bigger and integrate more data, they should retain customers and lure new ones in from rival asset managers. “In our thesis about demand for a whole portfolio view combining Aladdin and eFront capabilities, it’s driven new sales for both Aladdin and eFront,” Small said last July. “We’ll look to repeat this success with Preqin and have a business plan that we believe can generate significant synergies resulting in an 18% [internal rate of return].” Better client relationships also means Preqin can create a flywheel effect within BlackRock. Clients who use Preqin could be more inclined to tap BlackRock for its other services as well. “Preqin just makes [these platforms] better and crowds out competition and drives growth in all [BlackRock’s] businesses,” Evercore analyst Glenn Schorr told CNBC recently. “What’s probably even more appealing to this amazing asset manager is the insights [Preqin] can bring on where and how it can grow in the future as an asset manager, and then the value that [the deal] can bring to their large LPs that they manage money for,” Schorr said. “I think that’s the mindset that Larry probably had when he was talking about how important of a business this could be for them.” And lastly, BlackRock’s Preqin buy further expands the firm into the fast-growing world of private markets, which have grown enormously over the past several years as investors look for alternatives. It follows the firm’s other recent moves in the space. BlackRock closed a $12.5 billion deal for infrastructure investment firm Global Infrastructure Partners in October. The firm is also expected to complete its purchase of private credit manager HPS Investment Partners for $12 billion as well in 2025. “There are few people that would disagree that private markets are a continued very large growth opportunity for any good asset manager, any good wealth management firm [or] any good bank as well,” Schorr said. (Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust is long BLK. See here for a full list of the stocks.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED. More

Trumpian types are unanimous: America needs factories. The president describes how workers have “watched in anguish as foreign leaders have stolen our jobs, foreign cheaters have ransacked our factories and foreign scavengers have torn apart our once beautiful American dream”. Peter Navarro, his trade adviser, says that tariffs will “fill up all of the half-empty factories”. Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, offers the most cartoonish pitch of all: “The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones—that kind of thing is going to come to America.” More

Officials from America and China met for the latest round of trade talks, starting on June 9th, in Lancaster House, a neoclassical mansion near Buckingham Palace. It was commissioned in 1825 by the “Grand Old” Duke of York, whose military manoeuvres have been immortalised in a children’s song. A fitting venue, then, for a trade war of escalations and climbdowns. More

Officials from America and China met for the latest round of trade talks on June 9th-10th in Lancaster House, a mansion near Buckingham Palace. The building was commissioned in 1825 by the “Grand Old” Duke of York, whose military manoeuvres have been immortalised in a children’s song. A fitting venue, then, for a trade war of escalations and climbdowns. More

More Republicans than Democrats get health insurance through the Affordable Care Act marketplace, according to a poll by KFF.
The GOP-controlled House of Representatives passed a massive tax and spending bill in May that makes substantial cuts to health programs for the ACA, also known as Obamacare.
Millions of people are expected to lose health insurance coverage if the bill becomes law.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota), from left, Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyoming) and Senator Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) exit the West Wing of the White House on June 4, 2025. The Senate has begun deliberations over President Donald Trump’s massive “Big Beautiful Bill” that narrowly passed the House on May 22, with several Republican senators expressing concerns over its cost as well as cuts to Medicaid and clean energy tax credits.
Photographer: Eric Lee/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Republicans on Capitol Hill are weighing legislation that’s estimated to cut billions of dollars of funding for the Affordable Care Act and cause millions of people to lose their health insurance. Many of their constituents may not be happy about it, polling suggests.
Nearly half, 45%, of adults enrolled in a health plan offered through the ACA insurance marketplace identify as Republicans, according to a new survey by KFF, a nonpartisan group that conducts health policy research.

(More than three-quarters of those Republican ACA users identify as “MAGA” Republicans. Those MAGA Republicans represent 31% of ACA purchasers overall.)
Meanwhile, 35% of Democrats get their health insurance through the ACA, KFF found.

Republicans in the House of Representatives passed a multitrillion-dollar tax and spending package in May estimated to cut about $900 billion from health programs like Medicaid and the ACA, which is also known as Obamacare.
Senate Republicans are now considering the measure, which contains many of President Donald Trump’s domestic policy priorities. Republicans are trying to pass the megabill by the Fourth of July.
If the GOP enacts the legislation as written and doesn’t extend tax credits that lower monthly ACA health premiums, about 15 million people would lose health insurance, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

“A large constituency of Republicans using the programs are potentially facing cuts,” said Audrey Kearney, a senior survey analyst for KFF’s public opinion and survey research program.
The survey was conducted May 5 to 26 among a nationally representative sample of 2,539 U.S. adults, including 247 who have purchased their own health coverage.

Republicans more likely to be self-employed

Health plans offered via the ACA exchanges are primarily for Americans who don’t have coverage through their jobs or via a public program such as Medicare or Medicaid, experts said.
The self-employed fall into this coverage gap — and self-employed Americans tend to lean right, a likely reason more Republicans seem to be enrolled in ACA health plans relative to Democrats, Kearney said.
“Republicans are more likely to be entrepreneurs than Democrats,” according to a 2023 paper published by researchers at Columbia University, the University of California San Diego and the University of Alberta.
About 5.5% of Republicans become entrepreneurs, while that’s true of 3.7% of Democrats, they found.

Many red-leaning states didn’t expand Medicaid

The Affordable Care Act also expanded Medicaid coverage to more households.
However, 10 states haven’t adopted the expansion: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin and Wyoming. All voted for Trump in the 2024 presidential election.
Republicans are “more likely to live in nonexpansion states,” John Graves, a professor of health policy and medicine at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, wrote in an e-mail.
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Here’s why this matters for ACA enrollment: “In the non-expansion states, there’s a wider population eligible for the tax credits,” said Carolyn McClanahan, a physician and certified financial planner based in Jacksonville, Florida. She’s a member of the CNBC Financial Advisor Council.
In states that expanded Medicaid, nearly all adults with incomes up to 138% of the federal poverty line (about $22,000 for a one-person household in 2025) are eligible for Medicaid.
In states that didn’t expand Medicaid, a broader population is eligible for subsidies to make ACA health plans less expensive, Graves said. The subsidized exchanges are available for people between 100% and 138% of the federal poverty line, among others.

“Given the heavy subsidies in that income range, and large amount of otherwise uninsured people, that would suggest more GOP-identifying people with low incomes would go the (subsidized) exchange route,” Graves wrote.
The Affordable Care Act has been vilified by Republicans since passage during President Barack Obama’s tenure. However, provisions within the law — such as creation of the ACA marketplaces, coverage for those with pre-existing conditions and the ability to stay on parents’ health plan until age 26 — have broad appeal, said KFF’s Kearney.
As of 2023, nearly 1 in 7 U.S. residents had enrolled in an ACA marketplace plan at some point since 2014, the year in which states rolled out marketplace plans, according to a 2024 report from the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
“Our polling going back years has shown that when you ask about favorability of the ACA itself, Republicans view it as pretty unfavorable,” she said. “However, the actual provisions in it are very popular, and are popular among Republicans.” More