Prices Rose

WASHINGTON -- Producer prices rose one-half of 1 percent in July, the biggest increase in 15 months, while retail sales slowed slightly, the government said yesterday.But both overall figures masked changes in key sectors of the economy that give contradictory indications of whether the current economic expansion will lead to a sharp rise in inflation.And, taken together, the figures further muddled the question of whether the Federal Reserve will push up short-term interest rates again when its main policy committee meets Tuesday, Wall Street analysts said.

A snowy February threw a slight chill on shopping for homes throughout the Baltimore region, but prices continued to rise. The number of pending sales — properties under contract but not yet closed — dipped to about 2,440 last month, about 40 fewer than a year earlier, according to data provided by RealEstate Business Intelligence, a subsidiary of the MRIS multiple listing service. Baltimore's home sales market withstood the cold better than Washington's, where the number of new contracts declined by more than 11 percent, RBI found.

WASHINGTON -- Pushed by another big jump in oil prices, wholesale prices surged a surprising 1.1 percent in October, intensifying concern about the impact of inflation on the fast-weakening economy, the U.S. government reported yesterday.The October increase, which marked the third month in a row the key inflation index has surged by 1 percent or more, brought the rise in the overall Producer Price Index this year to an annual rate of 7 percent, the steepest since 1981.At the same time, however, analysts said the increases appeared to be confined almost entirely to the energy sector and have not yet begun to "ripple" to prices of other goods or to wages.

T. Rowe Price Group reported Wednesday that profit rose 22 percent in the quarter from a year ago to $241.9 million, buoyed by an uptick in the market that pushed assets under management to a new record. The Baltimore-based money manager earned 91 cents a share, beating analysts' expectations of 89 cents. Still, Price's stock closed Wednesday down by more than 4 percent, at $72.75 per share, because of lower-than-anticipated cash inflows. "The flows were a little on the disappointing side," said Jeffrey Hopson, a senior analyst with Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. in St. Louis.

RICHMOND, Va. -- Prices for retail goods and services rose in several mid-Atlantic states in December, according to a survey released yesterday by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.The monthly survey of businesses in Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, the Carolinas and the District of Columbia shows that prices for retail goods rose at an annual pace of 1.2 percent, below the 1.4 percent rise the previous month. Prices charged for services, meanwhile, rose at an annual rate of 1.0 percent last month, higher than November's 0.8 percent pace.

Economists worry about deflation - a persistent, broad decline in consumer prices that sometimes accompanies severe recessions. Deflation can lead to lower wages and other income, which makes it difficult to handle debt. Deflation can also accelerate a recession because consumers postpone buying, knowing prices will be lower next month. But fear not. A trip through the statistics shows that some costs continued to rise in December even as the overall consumer price index plunged. A few industries are still minting money.

Grocery prices in the Baltimore area fell in June for the first time in three months, led by a 3.4 percent decline in the prices of meat, poultry, fish and eggs, the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics said yesterday.Although food prices are 0.6 percent lower than they were in May, the price of an average "market basket" is 2.5 percent higher than it was at the same time last year. And, according to the index, Baltimore consumers paid $15.71 in June for a basket that cost $10 in 1982-1984.

NEW YORK - U.S. wholesale prices rose for a second month in February, reinforcing the view of the Federal Reserve that pressures on inflation have "picked up." The 0.4 percent increase in the Producer Price Index, or prices paid to producers, was led by higher costs for gasoline and food and followed a 0.3 percent rise in January, the Labor Department said yesterday. The core rate, which excludes food and energy, rose 0.1 percent in February after a 0.8 percent increase in January. Fed policy-makers raised their benchmark overnight bank rate to 2.75 percent yesterday.

Prices paid by consumers in May rose at their fastest rate in more than three years, the Labor Department reported yesterday. The news was greeted positively by stock and bond traders, who had been worried before the report that the news might be worse than it was. The rise in the broad Consumer Price Index was 0.6 percent, a bit higher than the consensus Wall Street forecast of 0.5 percent. The increase followed a rise of 0.2 percent in April. The index was pushed higher by rising energy and dairy prices, which posted their largest monthly gain since 1946.

Housing affordability dropped to a 14-year low in the second quarter, when prices rose at the fastest pace in more than a quarter century. The average household had 120.8 percent of the income needed to purchase a property at the median home price of $208,500, according to the National Association of Realtors. That share was the lowest since the third quarter of 1991, when it was 113.7 percent. The average percentage of a household's income used to pay a monthly mortgage bill rose to 20.7 percent, the highest since 1991.

More homes were sold last month - and for more money on average - than a year earlier in the Baltimore metro area. About 1,100 homes changed hands in January, up almost 9 percent from the previous year, according to numbers released Wednesday by Metropolitan Regional Information Systems. The average sale price was about $272,000, an increase of just over 2 percent. It's the first time in three years that both sales and average prices were up in the metro area. But it's too soon for home sellers to rejoice.

Economists worry about deflation - a persistent, broad decline in consumer prices that sometimes accompanies severe recessions. Deflation can lead to lower wages and other income, which makes it difficult to handle debt. Deflation can also accelerate a recession because consumers postpone buying, knowing prices will be lower next month. But fear not. A trip through the statistics shows that some costs continued to rise in December even as the overall consumer price index plunged. A few industries are still minting money.

You might have seen the scary news reports just before Thanksgiving: Housing prices fell nationwide last quarter - the first such decline since 1993. Even grimmer, total sales of houses and condominiums plunged 12.7 percent across the country, compared with the third quarter last year. And you might have wondered, is this the long-predicted popping of the housing-boom bubble or the beginning of an extended period of eroding values in American home real estate? How bad could it get in the months ahead?

Baltimore-area home sales dipped again in February, the fifth straight month of decline, amid signs that the market was steadying as it heads into the spring selling season. The 2,439 homes sold in Baltimore and the five surrounding counties was down 9.97 percent, compared with February 2005, according to statistics released yesterday by Metropolitan Regional Information Systems Inc., a Rockville company that tracks homes sold through the multiple-listing service. But the decline was less than in the preceding months, and the average sales price, which has fallen in five of the past seven months, notched upward to $294,105.

WASHINGTON -- Hurricanes Katrina and Rita cut a swath of destruction through the national economy last month, with surging energy costs pushing consumer prices to their highest monthly rise in 25 years, the government said in a flurry of economic statistics yesterday. Other data also weren't pretty, with industrial production dropping to its lowest level in 23 years and a measure of consumer confidence hitting a 13-year low. Retail sales also were relatively weak, and a measure of worker earnings took its worst drop in nearly a decade.

Low mortgage rates and growing demand for housing caused Maryland home prices to rise nearly 23 percent in the year that ended in June, the largest yearly increase in three decades. The state's one-year increase ranked seventh in the nation, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight said yesterday. It compared with a national average gain of 13.43 percent for the one-year period - the largest increase since the 12 months that ended in June 1979. Maryland joined three other states in reaching the highest level of price appreciation in the 30-year history of the agency's housing index.

Wholesale prices posted their biggest monthly gain in four years in August, a jump that was bigger than economists expected and big enough to send stock and bond markets into a short-term tailspin.The Labor Department reported yesterday a surprisingly steep 0.6 percent advance in the producer price index, following a strong increase of 0.5 percent in the previous month.Leading Maryland economists said the news was bad for August, but said the one-month gain does not change a basically positive inflation picture.

WASHINGTON -- Prices paid to factories, farmers and other producers fell as expected in October for the third time in five months as lower energy costs offset a jump in new car prices.The producer price index declined 0.1 percent last month, while the core rate of the PPI, which excludes often-volatile food and energy costs, was unchanged."There's no meaningful inflation out there," said Robert Dederick, a consulting economist at Northern Trust Co. in Chicago. The Federal Reserve "has nipped in the bud what was a worsening of inflation earlier this year," he said.

The nation's long housing boom appears to be losing steam. Sales of existing homes fell more than expected in July and prices were virtually flat compared with the previous month, the National Association of Realtors reported yesterday. Perhaps most significant, the price of condominiums, which have recently attracted a growing number of speculators looking to cash in on the boom, fell for the second straight month, while the number of condos on the market rose sharply. "We could very much be close to the peak at this time," said Lynn Reaser, chief economist at Bank of America's capital markets group.

Wholesale prices rose more sharply in July than expected and at a faster rate than consumer prices, the government reported yesterday, indicating that businesses were still shielding consumers from the full brunt of higher energy costs. The Producer Price Index, which measures what producers receive for goods and services, rose 1 percent in July, the Labor Department reported, double what economists had been expecting and a sharp turnaround from flat prices in June. Excluding food and energy, the core index of producer prices rose 0.4 percent, higher than the 0.1 percent that economists had forecast.