US inflation cooled to a six-month low in March, but tariff pressures are quickly mounting

Inflation slowed sharply in March, new data showed Thursday, underscoring the continued strength and resilience of the economy ahead of President Trump’s aggressive trade moves.

Inflation slowed sharply in March, new data showed Thursday, underscoring the continued strength and resilience of the economy ahead of President Trump’s aggressive trade moves. In any other timeline, such news would stoke optimism that Americans’ cost of living is no longer surging. Instead, Thursday’s Consumer Price Index report was likely another example of a ‘what might have been’ for the US economy. The latest reading of the Consumer Price Index — which showed inflation sharply cooling to an annual rate of 2.4% in March from 2.8% in February — lands as countries, businesses, markets and consumers grapple with America’s most severe escalation of its tariff rate in more than a century. Economists have cautioned that Thursday’s CPI report could very well mark the nadir in inflation this year as Trump’s massive and sweeping tariffs upend global order and make imports — and, likely, end-products for consumers — markedly more expensive. “If you consider a before and after snapshot, this is the ‘before,’” Robert Frick, corporate economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, told CNN in an interview. “We may be whistling past the graveyard right now, because we know that costs are going to increase.”