Pricing data from June indicated that outside of some select items where costs continue to grow, inflation is trending back towards the Federal Reserve’s inflation goal.

So-called trimmed mean measures, which exclude outliers in both price increases and decreases, showed inflation at its lowest since the early part of the decade.

The Dallas Fed’s measure, in fact, puts the one-month annualized rate for June at just 1.4%, down a whopping 1.3 percentage points from May and at its lowest level since November 2020.

Further, the 12-month rate, which Fed policymakers watch more closely, dipped to 2.2%, down 0.2 percentage point from a month ago to a bottom not seen since July 2021.

While Fed officials are quick to stress that they don’t focus on one month of any data point, the trend in the trimmed mean could get some attention, particularly in light of Chairman Kevin Warsh’s intention to reexamine how the central bank views inflation and what data points it employs.

Trimmed mean data “should also now fall closer to target-consistent rates,” Citigroup economist Andrew Hollenhorst said in a note.

“The fact that underlying inflation is still slowing toward target – as indicated by a broad set of indicators – is now even more relevant given Chair Warsh’s suggestion that he would analyze inflationary pressure by looking across a broad range of metrics,” he added. “We expect markets to price-out rate hikes in coming months on inflation data, and price-in cuts if the unemployment rate rises as we project.”

The measure specifically uses the personal consumption expenditures price index — the Fed’s primary inflation forecasting tool — results of which were released Thursday. The Commerce Department said the all-items index fell 0.1% for the month, largely on a sharp decline in fuel costs, while the core level that excludes food and energy gained 0.1%. On an annual basis, the two gauges rose a respective 3.7% and 3.3%.

Similarly, the Cleveland Fed has a “16% trimmed mean” that includes price changes below the 92nd percentile and above the 8th percentile. That measure, though, uses the consumer price index as its benchmark. For June, the trimmed CPI was at 2.63%, which, on an unrounded basis, was the lowest since May 2021.

While such measures could get more prominent placement on the Fed’s dashboard under Warsh, there are a number of caveats.

For one, Lorie Logan, who as Dallas Fed president oversees its trimmed mean measure, has cautioned about reading too much into it because of compositional factors at play.

Specifically, she said her researchers have found “that…

Iraq and Syria signed an agreement on Friday to rebuild an oil pipeline that would provide an alternative to the Strait of Hormuz.

Baghdad and Syria inked the deal at a Chamber of Commerce summit in Washington D.C. on U.S. investment in Iraq. Energy Secretary Chris Wright presided over the signing by Basra Oil Company CEO Bassem Abdul Karim Nasr and Syrian Petroleum Company CEO Youssef Qablawi.

“There is so much room to drive improvement in Iraq, to raise oil production, to reduce dependencies on hostile neighbors, to bring freedom, prosperity and abundant energy to the nation of Iraq,” Wright said before the signing.

Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi is visiting the U.S. this week. He met with President Donald Trump at the White House on Tuesday.

The pipeline stretches from Kirkuk in northern Iraq to Syria’s Mediterranean coast with a nameplate capacity of 700,000 barrels per day, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. It has been closed since it was damaged during the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Iraq, the second largest oil producer in OPEC, has suffered heavily from the disruption to tanker traffic in the Strait of Hormuz during the U.S.-Iran war. Baghdad is reliant on its southern port city of Basra on the Persian Gulf due to limited pipeline options to bring its oil to global markets.

Iraq’s oil production fell more than 50% to about 1.9 million barrels per day in June compared to around 4.2 million bpd in February before the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, according to OPEC data.

Several Gulf states want to expand pipeline capacity to reduce their dependency on Hormuz. The United Arab Emirates is building a second pipeline to the Port of Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman, which would double its export capacity outside the strait.

Saudi Arabia is considering expanding its pipeline to the Red Sea by 2 million bpd, people close to the matter told Reuters last week.

Analysts have cautioned that pipelines can act as a hedge against geopolitical risk in Hormuz, but they do not resolve the underlying threat posed by Iran to energy infrastructure in the region.

“The problem isn’t the waterway,” Bob McNally, founder of Rapidan Energy, told CNBC’s “Power Lunch” on Monday. “It’s that Iran can use weapons to attack loading facilities, pumping stations, the end stations, these terminals, and the storage units of these pipelines.”

Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh has said that inflation is a “choice.” The same could also be true of how inflation is measured.

While the central bank has its own favorite metric courtesy of the Commerce Department, the public data base is rife with other gauges of how price pressures are best viewed.

It’s likely that many of them will get a serious look as the Warsh Fed plots what he called on Wednesday a “new course” for how it operates — and specifically what will be the data triggers for the ways it implements monetary policy.

“My hope, my aspiration, is that nine-12 months from now we’re going to be using new technologies to understand what’s happening in the real economy in a contemporaneous, real-time way that positions us as central bankers to make better decisions,” he said during a discussion at the European Central Bank Forum on Monetary Policy in Sintra, Portugal.

Warsh has formulated five task forces to look at an array of Fed functions. One will be data-focused while another will take a look at how officials measure, and react to, inflation.

The review is sure to be about more than the age-old battle between headline inflation and core inflation, the latter excluding the day-to-day necessities of gas and groceries because of how volatile those prices can be.

Instead, the Fed can use the process as a way to bring in other data points that paint a more complete picture of the cost-of-living challenges consumers face from inflation, which has been running hot for five years.

A variety of choices

These include measures from other central bank offices such as the Dallas Fed and its focus on “trimmed mean” inflation that includes outliers. Or the Atlanta Fed’s “sticky” and flexible” inflation that distinguishes between prices that tend to move up and down a lot and those that are steadier. There are also widely followed surveys from the University of Michigan and the New York Fed, as well as private sector measures such as the “Truflation” gauge that employs “cutting-edge technology to deliver the world’s only verifiable daily inflation indexes.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, these measures can and do present very different pictures of inflation, with some reinforcing the view that prices are still too high and others saying the Fed might be closer to its 2% goal than traditional measures indicate.

“A good read on where inflation is headed is critical to whether the Fed needs to move rates,” Claudia Sahm, chief economist for New Century Advisors, wrote in a Substack post Tuesday. “But trend is not destiny — even a 2% trend is no guarantee of price stability, since actual inflation can diverge from trend as it does now.”

A basic view of the mainstream indicators shows inflation is well above the Fed’s 2% target.

The consumer price index — a broad amalgam of what consumers pay for goods and services — showed headline…

Iraq and the United Arab Emirates are fast-tracking plans to expand oil pipelines to replace the capacity lost by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, as new data reveals their stark dependency on the Persian Gulf. 

Last week, the Iraqi cabinet approved plans to accelerate crude exports through the Kurdistan-Turkey pipeline network, which would more than triple its existing shipments from 220,000 barrels per day to 770,000. 

The route offers an alternative passage through Kurdistan to Turkey’s Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. When operating at full capacity, it should provide relief to the oil-dependent Iraqi economy, which contributed 53% to its real GDP in 2025, according to the World Bank.

Exclusive data shown to CNBC by economic intelligence provider QuantCube Technology reveals that Iraq’s overall exports have virtually dried up since the war began, as a result of its geographical dependence on Hormuz.

QuantCube’s indicator measures the volume of deadweight tonnage leaving Iraqi and UAE ports, which provides an estimate of the cargo weight the ships are carrying. 

“Iraq is in a much more complicated situation because we know that most, if not all of its oil, transits through Hormuz,” Alan Lemangnen, senior economist at QuantCube, told CNBC in an interview. 

Iraq announced in a press conference on May 16 that it had exported 10 million barrels of oil through the Strait of Hormuz in April, down from 93 million barrels before the war. 

Meanwhile, Abu Dhabi is fast-tracking construction of the new West-East pipeline to Fujairah as it also looks to expand its oil export capacity and bypass the Strait of Hormuz chokepoint.

The project, expected to come online in 2027, will double the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company’s (ADNOC) export capacity.

Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan on May 15 called for faster delivery of the pipeline to meet rising global energy demand.

The UAE can still export oil through other terminals, easing the impact of the Hormuz closure.

“It’s clear that Iraq, because of its location and its inability to reroute, is in a much more complicated situation than the UAE or KSA,” Lemangnen added.

“The UAE still has the Fujairah terminal. Even if it has been damaged during the war, it still, in theory, has the infrastructure and vessels to export a large amount of oil.” 

But even existing alternatives are at risk. Saudi’s East-West pipeline was attacked by Iran in April, while Fujairah has also come under attack from Iranian drones, disrupting oil loading operations at its crude export terminal. 

The East-West pipeline, linking processing facilities near the Persian Gulf to an export hub on the Red Sea, and the UAE pipeline to the port of Fujairah, have a combined estimated 3.5 to 5.5 million barrels per day (mb/d) of…

Middle Eastern oil and gas producers are still scrambling to find and expand alternative routes for their exports, almost two months after the critical Strait of Hormuz was effectively shut to commercial traffic.

There is still little clarity on when or how the U.S.-Iran conflict can be brought to an end, and both sides are using the Strait of Hormuz — a vital waterway through which around 20% of the world’s oil was shipped before the war — as a bargaining chip in stop-start peace talks.

The channel’s double-blockade has supercharged global energy prices and highlighted the global energy market’s vulnerability when key waterways and “chokepoints” — like the Strait of Hormuz, Panama Canal or Suez Canal — are blocked, whether by accident or by design.

The IEA’s Executive Director Fatih Birol told CNBC Thursday he felt like a “broken record” telling countries to diversify energy supply routes years before the current crisis.

“The $110 trillion global economy can be taken hostage by a couple of hundred men with guns across a 50-kilometer stretch of strait — it doesn’t make sense at all. We should make alternative routes, alternative options,” he told CNBC’s Steve Sedgwick.

Risks around the Strait of Hormuz “were well understood” for years, Maisoon Kafafy, senior adviser to the Atlantic Council’s Middle East programs, told CNBC, but the war has shown how deep those vulnerabilities are — and the need for change.

“Hormuz has been the world’s most documented energy chokepoint for decades, and its risks were mapped, modeled, and priced into infrastructure decisions across the region,” she said.

“Until the February 2026 closure, the costs, while significant, did not reach the threshold that would justify the scale of investment alternative infrastructure requires. The deterrent architecture and economic interdependencies surrounding the strait made full closure seem too costly to any actor to contemplate seriously. The closure has demonstrated that those assumptions were breakable,” Kafafy said.

The Iran war is shifting that cost-benefit analysis, while Gulf oil producers — now highly wary of the threat posed by the Islamic Republic and fearful of being beholden to forces beyond their control in the future — are finally looking beyond the Strait of Hormuz for exports.

“The war has also accelerated investments in bypass routes. So, other countries are re-routing. That means that Iran, and its main strategic leverage, weakens,” Lucila Bonilla, lead emerging markets economist at Oxford Economics, told CNBC Tuesday.

The Department of Labor on Monday proposed a rule that would allow 401(k) plans to more easily include alternative assets such as cryptocurrency, real estate and private market assets.

The proposal is in response to President Donald Trump‘s executive order, released in August, which directed the Labor Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission to facilitate expanded access to alternative assets in 401(k)s.

“This proposed rule will show how plans can consider products that better reflect the investment landscape as it exists today,” Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer said in a statement.

Although 401(k) plans are already not prohibited from including such assets, fears of lawsuits challenging their investment decisions have kept most plan sponsors on the sidelines.

The Labor Department rule creates a so-called “safe harbor” that can help shield plan sponsors from litigation. It identifies six factors for a plan fiduciary to “objectively, thoroughly, and analytically consider” when selecting alternative investments. The six factors are performance, fees, liquidity, valuation, performance benchmarks and complexity.

The rule is subject to further review, including a 60-day public comment period, before it can be finalized.

It comes as private credit markets are under stress from investor redemptions and concerns about overexposure to software investments amid artificial intelligence disruptions.

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