WASHINGTON, June 13 Reuters Eroding inflation data and fastchanging views in financial markets on Monday have opened the door to a largerthanexpected threequarterpercentage point interest rate increase when Federal Reserve officials meet this week.

It is a move officials had downplayed as their twoday meeting approached over recent weeks, but which they now may be poised to adopt in response to data that has yet to show progress on taming the pace of price increases. The growing possibility of a surprise move was reported earlier on Monday by the Wall Street Journal, helping to further push trade in future contracts tied to Fed policy in that direction.

Fed officials have not commented publicly since the start of their premeeting blackout period on June 4, and prior to that had said they were leaning toward a second straight halfpoint rate increase at their June 1415 policy meeting.

But that outlook was conditioned on, as Fed Chair Jerome Powell said at his May press conference, economic and financial conditions evolving broadly in line with expectations. … Expectations are that well start to see inflation, you know, flattening out.

It hasn39;t.

Instead, Labor Department data released on Friday for May showed consumer price inflation accelerating to 8.6. An alternate trimmed mean measure from the Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank that the Fed watches also accelerated, a sign that price pressures are broad and not limited to outlying groups of goods or services with…