By Kantaro Komiya
TOKYO (Reuters) – Tokyo consumer inflation for October is likely to have fallen short of the central bank’s price target for the first time in five months, a Reuters poll showed on Friday.
Tokyo’s core consumer price index (CPI), a leading indicator of national price developments, was expected to rise 1.7% from a year earlier, the average forecast of 18 economists showed.
That would follow a 2.0% rise in September and would be the first time the data has missed the Bank of Japan’s (BOJ) 2% target since May’s 1.9% growth.
“The momentum of food price increases is waning and the pace of recovery in consumer spending remains slow despite significant wage growth,” said Takeshi Minami, chief economist at the Norinchukin Research Institute.
Japan’s national core CPI, which excludes fresh food but includes energy products, slowed to a 2.4% increase in September, data showed earlier on Friday.
The government will release the October Tokyo CPI data on October 25 at 8:30 a.m. Japan time (October 24 at 11:30 p.m. GMT). This will be the latest price data for the BOJ when it releases its quarterly economic forecasts on October 30. 31 policy meeting.
The BOJ is widely expected to leave interest rates unchanged at its October meeting, according to a Reuters poll. A slim majority of economists expected the BOJ to stick with the current rate of 0.25% until the end of December, and almost 90% of economists expect a rise to 0.5% by the end of March.
(Reporting by Kantaro Komiya; Editing by Jacqueline Wong)
