A University of Kentucky professor said it’s too early to tell how the Trump Administration’s sweeping tariffs are affecting the rate of inflation. Mike Clark is the director of UK’s Center for Business and Economic Research at the Gatton College of Business and Economics.
“Sometimes initial tariffs are put out there, or some announcements are made to change the tariffs, and then they're paused, or they're changed in some way. And so I think with a lot of the pauses in the tariffs, they may not have had an immediate effect in March.”
Clark said the on-again, off-again nature of many of the administration’s tariffs make it difficult to judge their inflationary impact. He said those that stick around will be felt.
“As those tariffs are put into place, we would expect inflation to eventually increase, at least for those commodities. But how quickly that actually happens is pretty uncertain.”
According to the most recent U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report, the consumer price index dropped a tenth of a point on a seasonally adjusted basis in March, after rising two-tenths of a point in February.
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