WASHINGTON — Wholesale prices in the United States rose by a larger-than-expected 2.6 percent last month from a year earlier, a sign that some inflation pressures persist.

The increase, the sharpest year-over-year increase since March 2023, comes at a time when other price indicators suggest that inflation is easing.

The Labor Department said Friday that its producer price index — which tracks inflation before it reaches consumers — rose 0.2 percent between May and June after being unchanged the month before.

Excluding food and energy prices, which tend to bounce around from month to month, so-called core wholesale prices increased 0.4 percent from the prior month and 3 percent from June last year.

The increase in wholesale inflation last month was driven by a sizable 0.6 percent rise in services prices, led by higher profit margins for machinery and auto wholesalers.

Profit margins for wholesalers and retailers — categorized as “trade services” in the producer price report — can be very volatile, though.

By contrast, a measure of wholesale inflation that excludes trade services, food and energy was unchanged between May and June.

It helps explain why many economists were not alarmed by Friday’s unexpected uptick in overall wholesale inflation.

In addition, the overall prices of goods fell 0.5 percent. Gasoline prices tumbled 5.8 percent at the wholesale level. Food prices also dropped.

The producer price index can provide an early sign of where consumer inflation is headed.

Economists also watch it because some of its components, notably healthcare and financial services, flow into the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge — the personal consumption expenditures, or PCE, index.

Some of the wholesale price components that feed into PCE — including some healthcare costs — came in below expectations Friday, raising hopes for continued progress toward easing consumer price inflation, which would reassure the Fed.

Friday’s wholesale figures follow the government’s report Thursday that consumer inflation cooled in June for a third straight month.

Consumer prices declined 0.1 percent between May and June — the first such drop in overall inflation since May 2020, when the economy was paralyzed by the pandemic.

As a whole, this week’s price figures, along with other recent data, still suggest a continued slowdown in the inflation that first gripped the nation three years ago, when the economy rocketed out of the pandemic recession, leaving deep supply shortages and sending prices soaring.

The Fed raised its benchmark interest rate 11 times in 2022 and 2023, to a 23-year high, to try to curb the price spikes. Inflation has since cooled from its four-decade high of 9.1 percent, and the central bank is widely expected to begin cutting interest rates in September.

Associated Press