WASHINGTON: The Commerce Department announced that US personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price indexes, the Federal Reserve's preferred inflation indicator, continued to rise by 6.6 percent in March over the previous year.

According to the Department of Commerce's Bureau of Economic Analysis on Friday, this compares to a downwardly revised 6.3 percent year-over-year rise in February.The core PCE price index grew 5.2 percent from a year ago in March, compared to 5.3 percent in February, excluding volatile food and energy.  The PCE price indexes increased by 0.9 percent month over month in March, following a 0.5 percent increase in February, according to the study.

The latest data serves as yet another reminder that inflation has remained stubbornly high, possibly justifying a 0.5-percentage-point rate hike at the central bank's policy meeting next week, as some Fed members have suggested.

The US Federal Reserve should "act a little more swiftly" in the face of rising inflation and accommodative monetary policy, according to Fed Chair Jerome Powell, who signalled a 50-basis-point rate hike for the May meeting.

The US economy declined at an annual pace of 1.4 percent in the first quarter of this year, owing to the Omicron spike and rising prices, fueling fears of a potential recession, according to the US Commerce Department.

As per Gary Hufbauer, a former US Treasury official and non-resident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, there is no historical evidence that the Federal Reserve can bring inflation down to its 2-percent goal without causing a recession with such high inflation.

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