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Consumer prices jumped more than expected last month, with rent, food and furniture costs surging as a limited supply of housing and a shortage of goods stemming from supply chain troubles combined to fuel rapid inflation, the New York Times reported. The Consumer Price Index climbed 5.4 percent in September from a year earlier, faster than its 5.3 percent increase through August and above economists’ forecasts. Monthly price gains also exceeded predictions, with the index rising 0.4 percent from August to September. The figures raise the stakes for both the Federal Reserve and the White House, which are facing a longer period of rapid inflation than they had expected and may soon come under pressure to act to ensure the price gains don’t become a permanent fixture. On Wednesday, President Biden said his administration was doing what it could to fix supply-chain problems that have helped to produce shortages, long delivery times and rapid price increases for food, televisions, automobiles and other products. In remarks at the White House, Mr. Biden said that the Port of Los Angeles would begin operating around the clock to relieve growing backlogs and that the administration was encouraging states to license truck drivers more quickly. Companies including Walmart, FedEx and UPS are also moving to work more off-peak hours, he said. Monthly price gains have slowed from their breakneck pace earlier this year — they popped as much as 0.9 percent this summer — but they remain abnormally rapid. Tangled shipping routes have helped to push couch and table prices higher, and consumers are paying more for everyday items like meat, eggs and gasoline.

President Joe Biden is pushing to ease supply shortages and tame rising prices in time for Christmas, but unsnarling U.S. supply lines could take far longer, experts told Reuters. Biden brought together powerbrokers from ports, unions and big business on Wednesday to address shipping, labor and warehousing pain in the U.S. supply chain, and announced new around-the-clock port operations in Los Angeles. As his Republican opposition seizes on possible Christmas shortages to connect Biden's economic policies to inflation, and try to stall a multitrillion-dollar spending bill in Congress in coming weeks, the White House's message Wednesday was that a solution is in sight. "This is an across-the-board commitment to going to 24/7," said Biden. The port opening, and a promise from retailers like Target and Walmart to move more goods at night are a "big first step," he said. Now, he said, "we need the rest of the private sector chain to step us as well." While more cooperation among the often competing, secretive players in the U.S. supply chain business is a plus, the White House's impact may be incremental at best, logistics experts, economists and labor unions warned. "What the president's doing isn't going to really hurt. But at the end of the day, it doesn't solve the problem," said Steven Ricchiuto, U.S. chief economist at Mizuho Securities. Players from ports to retail chains are already working full-tilt to handle the pandemic-fueled surge in imports and get holiday gifts onto shelves and e-commerce centers in time for the Nov. 26 Black Friday kickoff of the 2021 holiday season. Imports at the Port of Los Angeles — the No. 1 gateway for ocean trade with China — are up 30% so far this year over last year's record. But that has left some 250,000 containers of goods stacked up on the docks due to delayed pickups, from chassis shortages and a lack of space in rail yards and warehouses. And that is causing dozens of ships to back up at anchor outside the port.

The White House on Wednesday is expected to announce a pledge from one of the country’s busiest ports to operate around the clock, a move aimed at easing cargo bottlenecks that have led to goods shortages and higher consumer costs, the Wall Street Journal reported. By going to 24/7, the Port of Los Angeles will join the neighboring Port of Long Beach, Calif., which started doing the same thing last month. Major ports in Asia and Europe have operated around the clock for years. Expanded operations at the Port of Los Angeles, which declined to comment ahead of the announcement, would nearly double the hours that cargo can move, according to the White House. It said the extra shifts have been agreed to by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, which represents dock workers. The American supply chain has struggled to adapt to a crush of imports as consumers shifted from services to home goods, including electronics, and as businesses rush to restock pandemic-depleted inventories. Tens of thousands of containers are stuck at the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports, the West Coast gateways that move more than a quarter of all American imports. Dozens of ships are lined up to dock, with waiting times stretching to three weeks.

Running out of time to get its products on store shelves ahead of the holidays, the Basic Fun toy company made an unprecedented decision: It’s leaving one-third of its iconic Tonka Mighty Dump Trucks destined for the U.S. in China, the Associated Press reported. Given surging prices for shipping containers and clogs in the supply network, transportation costs to get the bulky yellow toy to U.S. soil is now 40% of the retail price, which is roughly $26. That’s dramatically up from 7% a year ago. And it doesn’t even include the cost of getting the product from U.S. ports to retailers. “We’ve never left product behind in this way,” says Jay Foreman, CEO of Basic Fun. “We really had no choice.” Toy companies are racing to get their products to retailers as they grapple with a severe supply-network crunch that could mean sparse shelves for the holidays. They’re trying to find containers to ship their goods while searching for alternative ports. Some are flying in some of the toys instead of shipping by boat to ensure delivery before Dec. 25. And in cases like Basic Fun, they are leaving toys behind in China and waiting for costs to come down. Like all manufacturers, toy companies have been facing supply-chain woes since the pandemic started and temporarily closed factories in China in early 2020. Then, U.S. stores temporarily cut back or halted production amid lockdowns. The situation has only worsened since the spring, with companies having a hard time meeting surging demand for all sorts of goods from shoppers re-entering the world.

Inflation held firm in August as consumer spending rebounded sharply from a July decline, according to data released Friday by the Commerce Department, The Hill reported. The personal consumption expenditures (PCE) index, the Federal Reserve's preferred gauge of consumer price growth, rose 0.4 percent in August and 0.3 percent without food and energy prices, the same rates as in July. Annual inflation ticked higher in August, rising 0.1 percent from July to 4.3 percent, while annual inflation without food or energy prices stayed even at 3.6 percent. The rate of consumer price increases has appeared to slow from a sharp rise this summer, but inflation has remained at decade-plus highs longer than many economists, including White House and Federal Reserve officials, had anticipated. A combination of severe shipping backlogs, supply chain snarls, hiring troubles in key industries and the stifling impact of the delta variant have all kept upward pressure on consumer prices, with little clarity into when they will ease. Consumer spending, however, snapped back strongly from a 0.1 percent decline in July, rising 0.8 percent in August and 0.4 percent when adjusted for inflation.

Claire’s Holdings LLC, the retail chain where legions of pre-teens and teenagers got their first piercings and earrings, filed to go public in the U.S., Bloomberg News reported. The Illinois-based company in its filing Wednesday listed the size of the offering as $100 million, a placeholder that will change when terms of the share sale are set. Claire’s is hoping to sell investors on its coming-of-age story the way it did with customers. It said in its filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it has “a powerful following with the highly influential Generation Z audience, which consists of over 2.5 billion individuals globally.” Activist investor Paul Singer’s Elliott International, Monarch Alternative Capital, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. are listed as major shareholders, according to the filing. The company reported a net loss of $144 million on revenue of $356 million for the three months ended July 31, compared with a loss of $38 million on revenue of $184 million during the equivalent period last year. As of July, the company had more than 1,500 stores in North America and over 880 in Europe. It also operates in over 10,000 concessions globally across approximately 25 retail partners. Claire’s emerged from bankruptcy in 2018 after struggling for years with the debt it piled on from a 2007 leveraged buyout by Apollo Global Management Inc. The bankruptcy eliminated the vast majority of about $2.1 billion in debt. Like other chains with a heavy shopping mall presence, Claire’s has faced declining customer traffic and online competition.

The Delta variant of COVID-19 appeared to temper economic growth this summer, but economists expect the recovery from the pandemic to reaccelerate as the virus’s toll eases, the Wall Street Journal reported. In recent weeks, many economists lowered their forecasts for third-quarter economic growth in large part because consumers slowed spending on meals out, hotels and airline tickets amid the spread of the highly contagious Delta variant. The COVID-19 surge also complicated office and school reopenings, turning what had been expected to be a September boom into a downturn. One wild card is continued supply constraints—including product and worker shortages—that have been more severe than many analysts anticipated, contributing to inflation and downgrades in growth expectations. While constraints such as backups at U.S. ports and overseas manufacturing disruptions have persisted, the Federal Reserve and economists expect them to eventually ease. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell yesterday said that a recent spell of higher inflation might last longer than central bank officials had anticipated, but he repeated his expectation that the price surge should eventually fade.

The buy-now, pay-later services that let shoppers settle up for their purchases in four interest-free installments have so far been the domain of start-ups. But now a traditional financial player is moving in with an option of its own: Mastercard, the New York Times reported. The company announced plans yesterday for a new pay-later offering that it said would enable banks, financial technology companies, digital wallets and other lenders to provide a variety of installment payment options to their customers, whether they are making purchases online or in a store. Given Mastercard’s infrastructure that processes credit and debit payments, the program has the potential to ramp up competition in a segment dominated by upstarts like Afterpay, Sezzle, Klarna and Zip. “Merchants are able to accept this with zero effort on their part, either for online transactions or in-store,” said Craig Vosburg, Mastercard’s chief product officer. Mastercard said that it was already working with several financial institutions, including Barclays, Fifth Third, Huntington, SoFi and Synchrony, to offer products of their own. The program will become available in the first quarter of next year in the U.S., as well as in Australia and Britain. Even existing pay-later players could plug into Mastercard’s program if they choose to, which could broaden their reach — one of their biggest challenges.