Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of 64. Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:34 PM for 15h 18m 41s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 22.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Public Works Committee meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1777, Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette lands near Charleston, South Carolina, in order to help the Continental Congress to train its army.
In a small town with a large level of child poverty (under 18 years, 16.6%), inflation is especially pernicious. Figures showing that inflation is abating, as Jeanna Smialek reports in Inflation Continues to Cool, Offering Relief to Consumers, is welcome news:
Federal Reserve officials received an encouraging inflation report on Tuesday as a key price index slowed more than expected in May, news that could give policymakers comfort in pausing interest rate increases at their meeting this week.
The Consumer Price Index climbed 4 percent in the year through May, slightly less than the 4.1 percent economists had expected and the slowest pace in more than two years. In April, it had climbed 4.9 percent.
While that remains about twice the rate that was normal before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, it is down sharply from a peak of about 9 percent last summer.
The fresh data offer the latest evidence that the Fed’s push to control rapid price increases is beginning to work. Fed officials have been raising interest rates since March 2022 to make it more expensive to borrow money, in bid to slow consumer demand, tamp down a strong labor market and ultimately cool rapid inflation. They have lifted borrowing costs for 10 meetings in a row, to just above 5 percent, and many officials have suggested in recent weeks that they could soon take a pause to give themselves more time to assess how those adjustments are working.
Space station transits sun during spacewalk in amazing footage from Earth: