WASHINGTON, Oct. 27 (Xinhua) -- U.S. personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price indexes, the Federal Reserve's preferred inflation measure, rose 3.4 percent in September over the past year, the Commerce Department reported on Friday.
The latest figure came after the measure in June slowed to 3.2 percent year-on-year from 4 percent in May, before accelerating to 3.4 percent in July and August, indicating continued inflation pressures.
PCE prices ticked up 0.4 percent in September from the previous month, after a 0.4-percent increase in August, according to estimates released by the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis.
The PCE gauge takes into account how consumers change their behavior in light of higher prices and is a broader measure of consumer behavior than the Consumer Price Index.
The so-called core PCE price index, which strips out volatile food and energy prices, rose 3.7 percent in September from a year ago, down from 3.8 percent in August and 4.3 percent in July, but still well above the Fed's inflation target of 2 percent.
Twelve-month core PCE inflation peaked at 5.6 percent in February 2022.
U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell recently said that despite turning lower over the past few months, inflation is still too high, noting that the central bank is striving to balance the risk of tightening monetary policy too much against the risk of tightening too little.
"A few months of good data are only the beginning of what it will take to build confidence that inflation is moving down sustainably toward our goal," said the Fed chair.
Since March last year, the central bank has rapidly raised interest rates from near zero to a range of 5.25-5.5 percent, in an effort to fight the worst inflation in four decades.
