Washington, D.C. – Traders and investors were closely monitoring the latest Consumer Price Index (CPI) report, but an early release of the CPI data by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) went largely unnoticed.
Consumer Price Index
The CPI, which measures the average change over time in the prices paid by urban consumers for a market basket of goods and services, is a crucial indicator of inflation trends, cost of living adjustments, and purchasing power.
A few years ago, the BLS changed its data release protocol. Previously, the bureau provided advance copies to media members under a lock-up system at the bureau’s Washington, D.C. office for release at 8:30 a.m.
This practice ended during the Trump administration amid concerns that some clients of media outlets in the lock-up were gaining an unfair trading advantage. Now, the information is released on the BLS website at 8:30 a.m. without any pre-release, significantly affecting stock market trading dynamics.
However, in a statement posted on its website Wednesday evening, the BLS disclosed an inadvertent early release of a subset of files approximately 30 minutes before the scheduled time.
