The short answer on tariffs and inflation through the Consumer Price Index (CPI) is that they were having little impact. The bottom line is that tariff inflation was marginal at best and you really have to dig to find it.
 
If I had a discussion with most of you, you can all tell me where price inflation has hit you (or where you have passed it on to somebody). But at a macro level, it is being partially eaten throughout the supply chain and most of the impact is still muted.
 

I heard one of the staunchest opponents to tariffs say on Wednesday that they anticipate a one-time hit to inflation of 3 tenths of a percent pushing overall inflation (measured in the Fed’s favorite Personal Consumption Expenditures PCE – not in the CPI reflected in this article) to 3.1%. That’s nothing close to what we experienced in 2021-2023 during the global supply chain crisis. And even the Fed is forecasting it to quickly fall back down to 2.4% in 2026. …

The Fed’s favorite measure of inflation was released, and we saw it inch up. But once again, diving into the data to try and understand where tariff pressures were showing up and where they were still docile, revealed quite a bit.

For starters, I still love the Trimmed Mean PCE (average inflation) reading from the Dallas Fed. It strips off the highs and lows and averages the middle. This month for instance, eggs were down 60% and household linens were up 90%. The average inflation figure allows us to strip out the highs and lows (because many of those could be simply data anomalies on a specific month) and get to “real” street level inflation. It also incorporates real world inflation that comes through food and energy, if that is applicable in a common month unlike core inflation readings that strip those out. …

Data is coming in just about as volatile as tariff policy these days. The Dallas Federal Reserve monthly survey of manufacturing activity dipped last month, but it rebounded in one of the sharpest recovery periods in nearly four years. It jumped 20 points to 21.3. …