Unpopular opinion: I think they’ll announce CPI has dropped to 7.9% this week.
Here’s why:
1) they lie. Numbers have been cooked for a long time, might as well make things look good on a midterm year.
2) the CPI is a year-over-year number, so in the sliding 12-month window we’re going to lose the change from March-April 2021, which was huge ( 1.6 ), and we’re gaining the change from March-April 2021 (yet unknown), so as long as the cooked CPI formula reports a Delta smaller than the 1.6 from last March-April, the CPI number they report will go down. Since the last few months have only gone up by 0.2-0.6 I feel pretty confident that with the 1.6 falling of the 12 month window will dominate the metric and the number will drop slightly
Another way to think about it is that since it’s “change in the last year”, this month has the advantage that inflation was already pretty bad last April, so they now get to use that already inflated period as the starting point.