Think of this as though it's mixed doubles in tennis. This is a chart of the PPI pressures in the monetary union, while the table is a more detailed decomposition of pressures within the HICP consumer price measure. The PPI report is a graphic depiction of where the pressures are coming from in the inflation process at the primary levels. It shows us that the greatest pressures are coming from intermediate goods, where the kick to inflation is the strongest. Next, capital goods prices at the producer level are rising on a milder gradient, enjoying an increase at a pace above 2%. However, consumer goods prices in the PPI framework are weak, with a growth rate that has migrated back down toward zero. Yet in the overall HICP data, consumer prices at the consumer level are showing considerable pressure. They're also showing considerable upward momentum, and they're showing us broad inflation pressures all on their own.
The pressures we see in consumer prices are not being pushed up through the producer-price process per se. However, depending on how you look at or think about consumer prices, we know that PPI prices are part of the cost of consumer goods and transportation costs are actually part of the cost of selling to the public as well. That requires not just the production of consumer goods but also the transportation of them to the wholesale location and then to the retail location. Transportation costs are an important part of consumer prices, and we're more aware of that these days because people do a lot more online shopping. They can see the difference between going to the store for a good and having it delivered to their house, where they have to pay an explicit delivery charge. A delivery charge would reflect the fact that somebody has to come to deliver it, but also that a vehicle has to be driven and that vehicle has to be fueled. The PPI shows us that a lot of the pressure being passed on is coming through that fuel channel.
Despite the fact that there's not a lot of cost-push pressure coming from the producer-price stage of production to the consumer, that certainly does not mean that final product consumer price pressures don't exist. We see those pressures in the detailed consumer price report exhibited in the table. As of September, the HICP headline was up 3.8% over 12 months, with the core at 2.5%. Both of those ring the cash register at a pace too high for the ECB target. As of September, that 3.8% pace is at a 90.8 percentile standing on year-over-year inflation data back to 2001, a 25-year comparison. But the lower 2.5% core pace still has an 85.6 percentile standing on that same timeline. These metrics tell us that not only is inflation too high by the standards of the European Central Bank, but they are also significantly elevated compared to what they've been historically.
We provide year-over-year inflation rates for detailed categories within the HICP as well as in the right-hand column, the rankings of inflation for those different categories. Inflation clocks a pace above the 50% ranking for nine of the categories in the HICP presented in the table. In contrast, only five categories have rankings below 50%. The 50% level is significant for rankings because it identifies the median for each of these measures, so we have above-median inflation in nine categories and below-median inflation in only five.
At the bottom of the table, we look at the percent of categories for which inflation is accelerating over three months and over six months. Over three months, inflation is accelerating for 56% of the categories, whereas over six months inflation is accelerating in 50% of the categories. Acceleration tendencies are neutral; by this, I mean that, in data back to 2001, the average percent accelerating over three months is 50% and the average accelerating over six months is 50.2%, so that inflation accelerating or decelerating over this broad period has been an even-handed proposition, with inflation accelerating about half the time and decelerating about half the time. That's just a statement about the proportion of categories that are accelerating; the next question is how strong the acceleration is, because the ranking at the far-right hand side of the table shows that, for three-month inflation, the ranking for the proportion of categories that are accelerating is at 53.9%, whereas over six months, the ranking is at 53.7%. The table also shows the median inflation for the categories listed in the table as well as the average. In September, the median category saw inflation at 2.7%, while the average category was at 2.9%. The median rank of inflation on data back to 2001 is at 63.6%, while the average rank of inflation back to 2001 is 59.9%. There was a slight step down in the median and average inflation rates between August and September even though the inflation rate had gone up between the two periods.
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