The Fed and financial markets watch the same CPI data and often reach different conclusions. That's not a communication problem — it's a measurement one. Markets have anchored on headline year-over-year CPI as the primary signal. The Fed's attention has shifted increasingly to core services ex-shelter, sometimes called supercore — the component that strips out food, energy, and lagged housing costs to isolate wage-driven inflation in labor-intensive service sectors. Supercore moves slowly, responds poorly to rate hikes, and rarely makes headlines. When the two measures diverge — headline falling while supercore stays elevated — markets and the Fed are effectively pricing two different economies from the same release. The market reads a soft print as confirmation that rate cuts are coming. The Fed reads the same data as persistent wage pressure that forecloses them. Both interpretations are internally consistent. The more durable question isn't what any single print shows. It's whether supercore is structurally converging with headline as goods deflation fades — or whether the gap has become a permanent feature of how post-pandemic inflation gets measured and interpreted.