Breitbart Business Digest: The Fed’s Tariff Math Doesn’t Add Up to Inflation

Its sample covers just 20 percent of the consumer basket. - John Carney

• It’s widely being read as showing that tariffs have pushed up consumer prices, with many reports claiming that goods inflation ran 2.9 percentage points higher because of tariffs.
• In reality, however, the paper shows no such thing.

In the first place, the paper does not show and does not even claim that tariffs pushed up overall inflation by 2.9 percentage points.
Its sample covers just 20 percent of the consumer basket.
Translate the estimate into a contribution to overall consumer prices and you get roughly six-tenths of a percentage point, before accounting for anything happening elsewhere in the economy...

The idea that tariffs drove overall inflation higher is challenged by the fact that over the year the paper studies, inflation actually fell...