Fed's preferred inflation gauge shows a modest rise in latest sign of slowing price increases

Your instinct is correct, don't dismiss it. The Fed's goal with interest rates was to reduce the crisis of increased employee leverage by pushing corporations to reduce their workforces. That means making a lot of regular people suffer to keep the value of the owner's capital maximized. Protecting the ego scores of a relatively tiny number of people by actively harming most everyone else in tangible, basic human needs terms. If that isn't sociopathic cruelty, I don't know what is.

When there is a national crisis, note our middle managers in Washington don't say we need to protect our society, they say we need to protect our beloved economy. An economy is supposed to be a mere tool better distribute goods and services for the benefit of a society. Ours has metastasized to the point our society lives in service to our economy, which is perverse but the tragic, morbid reality.

The goal of the fed is to increase the net worth of the owners, full stop. That almost always comes at the peasant's, or what the oligarchs would consider their livestock's, expense.

Whenever the Fed is happy, it's almost always bad news for non-wealthy Americans, despite all the self-hating, capitalism true believer peasants that have deluded themselves into believing the lie that the owner's success is the peasant's success. It's not. Trickle down economics was an intentional grift at its inception, and that grift has become our economy's core philosophy.

For any young people unaware, the trickle down economic fairy tale is "funnel as much of the nation's generated capital to the already wealthy as possible, and one day they'll whip their dicks out and urinate golden showers of prosperity down on all the peasants." They were kind of conning and insulting their capital battery peasants at the same time!

Cooling inflation is things getting better. A little inflation is not bad.

There was never a world where we would deflate back to any reasonable dollar value.

The stock market cannot handle deflation, as it would be more valuable to hoard cash than to invest. So the rich would lose tons of value.

Almost nothing will ever really get cheaper.