April CPI Preview: $118 Brent Locks In a Hot Print
Tuesday May 13. The Bureau of Labor Statistics releases April CPI at 8:30am ET. The math is already mostly written. Brent crude averaged in the $111-124 range through April and closed May 1 at $118.26. Retail gasoline ran with it. The headline CPI base from April 2025 — 320.302 — sits only 0.16% above the March 2025 reading, which leaves almost no slack for an oil-month MoM print to shrink the year-over-year number. The arithmetic is unforgiving: any April MoM at or above 0.27% prints headline YoY 3.4% or higher, the highest reading since the March 2026 panic that buried the rate-cut narrative. The FOMC voted 8-4 to hold on April 29. Three of those four dissents wanted less dovish language, not more. Stephen Miran was alone on the cut side. The April CPI release is the first inflation data point between FOMC meetings, and it lands directly into a dissent geometry that already tilts hawkish. Nothing in the April data flow gives the doves a way back. Below is the math that says so, the energy channel that drives it, and the decision framework for the May 13 print.