Prices for a wide range of everyday items would have actually dropped by nearly 1 percent last year and into early this year if not for the tariffs implemented by President Donald Trump, CNBC reports. A new paper from researchers at the New York Federal Reserve indicates that the cost of 67 specific categories of goods was 2.9 percentage points higher as of February due to these levies.
It’s been a long-standing point of debate among economists, as everyone expected the levies to drive up costs, but it was notoriously hard to track the exact ripple effects. Companies aren’t always transparent about how they adjust their pricing models, making it difficult to pin down the data. Now, the New York Fed has cleared that up by showing that for every percentage point increase in the average tariff, consumer goods prices saw a boost of roughly a quarter of a percent one year later.
