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Has anything actually gotten more expensive because of Trump’s tariffs?

 

Predictions from economists were dire after Trump launched his tariff campaign. Prices would rise, they said.
US retail sales fell for a second straight month in May, suggesting anxiety over tariffs and personal finances prompted consumers to pull back after an early-year spending rush. David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images

US retail sales fell for a second straight month in May, suggesting anxiety over tariffs and personal finances prompted consumers to pull back after an early-year spending rush. David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images

CNN — Predictions from mainstream economists were dire after President Donald Trump launched his tariff campaign just a couple weeks after he began his second term in office: Prices would rise — sharply — they said, reigniting an inflation crisis that tens of millions of Americans had elected him to solve.

But that massive, tariff-induced inflation spike hasn’t materialized. Not even close.

Not yet, anyway.

Consumer prices rose just 2.4%, annually, last month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That was less than economists had expected, and only slightly higher than the 2.3% rate in April, which was the US economy’s lowest inflation since February 2021. According to the Personal Consumption Expenditures price index most closely followed by the Federal Reserve, core inflation — which strips out volatile items like food and gas prices — fell to 2.5% in April. That was the lowest reading since March 2021.

That’s a far cry from what economists and consumers have predicted. Month after month, inflation has fallen short of Wall Street’s expectations, as American businesses said they would be forced to hike prices as a result of historically high tariffs.

America’s effective tariff rate is now 14.1%, according to Fitch Ratings, up from 2.3% last year. That means Trump raised taxes on imported goods by nearly 12 percentage points in 2025. Economists expected substantial inflation increases as a result.

Goldman Sachs analysts last month said core goods inflation could hit 6.3% this year and consumer prices would surge 3.7% by early 2026. JPMorgan economists said core inflation would nearly double by the end of this year. And American consumers in May expected prices to rise an alarming 6.6% this year, according to sentiment surveys from the University of Michigan. That prediction fell in June, but consumers still expect inflation to hit 5.1% in 2025.

So what happened? Are economists just really bad at their jobs?

Not quite. Their predictions may yet come true — and economists are largely cleaving to their bets. America’s economy is enormous and complex, and predicting when prices will rise and fall can be an extremely tricky business — particularly when factoring in the on-again, off-again nature of Trump’s tariff regime.

Still, tariffs through mid-June haven’t caused inflation to spike. Love tariffs or hate them, there’s no denying inflation is lower now than when Trump took office.

Very little has gotten more expensive

Fed Chair Jerome Powell on Wednesday said just a few items are growing in price as a result of tariffs, including electronics that come from China. He said PCs and A/V equipment have become more expensive because of Trump’s trade war.

But the price increases aren’t widespread yet, Powell noted, because stores are still working through the inventory that came in to their warehouses before Trump put tariffs in place.

“Goods being sold at retailers today may have been imported several months ago, before tariffs were imposed,” Powell said.

 

Gantry cranes stand near shipping containers at Yangshan Port outside of Shanghai, China, on June 17.
Gantry cranes stand near shipping containers at Yangshan Port outside of Shanghai, China, on June 17. Go Nakamura/Reuters
 

Research firm Telsey Advisory Group, which has been tracking the prices of 80 select consumer items across a wide variety of retail categories, reported this week that just 19 products it has tracked have gained in price since mid-April — and 16 items’ prices fell. Similarly, the New York Times’ Wirecutter, which recommends consumer products, tracked the prices for 40 of its top picks over the course of two months and found this week that the vast majority didn’t change price at all: 10 gained in price and only half of those gained more than 7%.

“There haven’t been many significant upticks in prices as of yet given that many retailers are still selling through their lower-cost inventory,” Dana Telsey, CEO and chief research officer of Telsey Advisory Group told CNN.

Even autos, many of which are subject to a 25% tariff, plus a tariff of up to 25% on some imported auto parts, haven’t gained in price — they’ve fallen. New car prices fell 0.2% in May, according to car-buying research site Edmunds, and they rose only 2.5% compared to the pre-tariff period in March. Both new and used car prices fell in May, according to the BLS’ Consumer Price Index.

That’s because dealers are still working through their supply of pre-tariff cars, according to Ivan Drury, director of insights at Edmunds.

Trump team takes a victory lap

With prices remaining in check so far, the Trump administration has declared victory.

“They’ve all been discredited,” said the White House’s top trade adviser, Peter Navarro, in an interview last month with CNN, referring to tariffs’ detractors. “What we got in the first term [of Trump’s presidency] was not recession or inflation, we got price stability, robust economic growth and rising wages, just as we thought we would.”

Navarro has frequently pointed to the low overall inflation during Trump’s first term, despite his tariffs. And he’s right: CPI peaked at 2.9% in mid-2018 before falling below 2% throughout most of 2019.

But Navarro’s assertion about the impact of tariffs on the US economy comes with a couple of significant caveats: First, Trump during his current term has already placed tariffs of at least 10% on $2.3 trillion of imported goods, comprising 71% of all US goods imports, according to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation. In his first term, Trump placed tariffs on just $380 billion worth of foreign goods.

And second, the pandemic severely disrupted the global economy soon after Trump’s tariffs took effect, preventing economists from getting a decent picture of how significantly prices rose.

But some data shows prices gained in the specific sectors Trump targeted with his first-term tariffs. For example, after imposing some steel tariffs in 2018, US production expanded modestly, but it sent costs rising for cars, tools and machines; and shrank those industries’ output by more than $3 billion in 2021, the International Trade Commission found in a 2023 analysis.

Nevertheless, Joseph Lavorgna, a former Wall Street economist turned Treasury Department official, took a victory lap because inflation hasn’t risen since Trump imposed tariffs during his second term.

“Tariffs have just not shown up at all in any of the data,” Lavorgna, counselor to the Treasury secretary, told CNN this week. “The forecasting community has been completely wrong.”

Lavorgna, a former SMBC Nikko Securities chief economist who also served in the White House during Trump’s first term, said a broad range of inflation metrics suggests foreign producers are absorbing tariffs and that the trade war won’t be inflationary.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt echoed that message Thursday during a briefing, saying: “America is quickly returning to the successful formula of the first Trump administration: low inflation and rising wages.”

Economists say: Just wait

Many mainstream economists argue that the low inflation of the spring represents a calm before the summer storm, when they expect prices to rise.

“It’s a question of when, not if,” Stephanie Roth, chief economist at Wolfe Research, told CNN.

Walmart, Target, Lululemon, Home Depot and Costco among others have said in recent weeks that they will raise some prices because of tariff pressures. Although some of the big box retailers said they would work to keep most prices low, they acknowledged that they operate low-margin businesses, and in the cases when American-made alternatives are unavailable or more expensive, they expect that they’ll have to pass some of that additional cost to their customers.

 

An employee counts inventory in a Walmart Supercenter on May 15 in Austin, Texas.
An employee counts inventory in a Walmart Supercenter on May 15 in Austin, Texas. Brandon Bell/Getty Images
 

Consumers won’t be alone in their struggles with tariffs in the coming months, said said Sid Malladi, CEO of Nuvo, a company that manages businesses’ trade partnerships. Price hikes will weigh on businesses, too, many of whom will take on some of the hit to keep prices as low as possible for as long as possible. But that could mean difficult conversations in the boardroom later this year about potential layoffs and other cost cutting.

“This is early innings. No one wants to be first out of the gate,” said Malladi. “You don’t want to risk reputational damage to your brand, because raising prices in this environment might cause customers to turn away from you. Many may eat their margin for a few months.”

“It’s hard to overstate the level of anxiety businesses have,” Malladi added.

Small businesses, without the supply chain mastery of larger companies, have struggled in particular to afford higher tariff costs and have said they are reducing supply or raising prices. Many have complained that American alternatives for some foreign imports may be unavailable or are too expensive.

“While larger retailers may have the scale, capital and pricing power to absorb or strategically offset these pressures, small and mid-sized players remain significantly more vulnerable, with limited flexibility to manage rising input costs or supply disruptions,” Telsey said in TAG’s latest Product Pricing Analysis report.

Telsey noted that prices, when they eventually start to rise, won’t all gain equally or across the board. Only select goods will start to gain in price to start, likely beginning in late August or September.

“Inventory is ordered typically anywhere from six months to one year in advance, and it is expected that the select pricing pieces will begin to show up in late summer,” she said.

Fed Chair Powell on Wednesday agreed that the tipping point for broad consumer price increases could come this summer as inventories of pre-tariff warehoused goods dry up.

“We do expect to see more of that over the course of the summer,” Powell said. “It takes some time for tariffs to work their way through the chain of distribution to the end consumer.”

Normally, retailers hold about 1 to 2 months’ worth of inventory on items, noted Kristy Akullian, head of iShares Investment Strategy, Americas, so prices could begin to rise in the coming weeks.

Another indication that prices could start to spike: In April’s Institute for Supply Management services report, prices paid by businesses increased the most since November 2022, and business inventories contracted.

“Low inventories make it harder for companies to keep prices steady, so going forward, we expect the inflation impacts from tariffs to become more apparent,” Akullian said.

Powell agreed with that timeline, noting companies that report on their business sentiment to the Fed have said they expect to pass those tariff costs on down the supply chain.

“Many, many companies do expect to put all or — some of the effect of tariffs through to the next person in the chain, and ultimately, to the consumer,” Powell said. “So we’re beginning to see some effects. We expect to see more.”

Despite initial success at maintaining low prices, Treasury’s Lavorgna conceded inflation could begin to rise down the road because of tariffs.

“I’m not saying there can’t be a tariff effect on the numbers at some point,” he said.

CNN’s Phil Mattingly, Matt Egan and Chris Isidore contributed to this report.

Author: David Goldman, CNN

Source: CNN:::

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