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On Leap Day, markets successfully leapt, or at least carefully stepped, over a dangerous obstacle. It saw release of the Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) measure of inflation, which regularly comes out some weeks after the better known Consumer Price Index (CPI). Both measure the same thing in different ways, so the CPI should be a reliable indicator. But recently, the gap between them has widened; the PCE, which measures what people are spending, shows lower inflation than the CPI, which measures the prices at which things are being sold. The CPI number for January was disappointingly high, and PCE was expected to tick up. So there was apprehension.