A pair of economic reports released this past week challenge the conventional narrative that inflation is largely missing from the U.S. economy.
First, there was the January producer-price index from the Labor Department on Tuesday. The gauge of wholesale-level inflation is often shrugged off by markets. That’s especially true when it’s released after the consumer-price index, as it was this time, because of how it can help predict the pass-through of price changes from wholesalers to consumers. It deserves attention, though,…

