The Federal Reserve Bank of New York published a landmark study this week concluding that President Donald Trump's tariff policy pushed consumer goods prices 2.9 percentage points higher as of February 2026, accounting for the entirety of goods-level inflation during the period examined — since, absent the levies, the same basket of goods would have actually declined by roughly 1%.
The research, authored by Fed economists Mary Amiti and Sebastian Heise alongside Columbia University professor David Weinstein, analyzed 67 categories of non-oil consumer goods and arrived at a striking conclusion: nearly 90% of tariff costs were passed through to import prices, directly contradicting the administration's repeated claim that foreign exporters would absorb the burden.
