By Anneken Tappe, CNN Business

New York (CNN Business)Pandemic price hikes didn’t let up in the last month of 2021: A key inflation gauge hit a fresh a 39-year high.

The US consumer price inflation index rose 7% over the past year before seasonal adjustments, the steepest climb in prices since June 1982, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Wednesday. It was also a faster rate of increase than November’s 6.8%, and higher than economists had predicted.

Stripping out food and energy costs, which tend to be more volatile even in non-pandemic times, inflation rose to 5.5% between December 2020 and December 2021 — the biggest annual jump since February 1991. That was a much faster pace than in November, when core inflation stood at 4.9%. Read More…