An obscure methodological tweak -- a change in the source of data on the price of legal services -- resulted in meaningfully lower monthly PCE inflation in January. That's prompting questions about why the change was made, and why it wasn't disclosed publicly.

@drooney91 @MarcGoldwein Economists I spoke to say it's potentially reasonable to switch to PPI as the source of the legal services data under the circumstances. What's odd is to do it on an ad hoc basis, without notice, and in a month where the index would have pushed up inflation substantially.