According to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, prices for a wide range of everyday consumer goods would have fallen if not for President Trump's legally contested tariff policies.
Because of tariffs imposed during 2025 and early 2026, inflation across a sample of 67 product categories was pushed up by 2.9 percentage points as of February. The research team calculated that, absent the tariffs, goods prices would have declined over that period.
On April 2, 2025, at the White House in Washington, President Trump delivered remarks on his new tariff plan. The New York Fed said that without the tariffs pursued by Trump, prices for many everyday consumer goods would have moved lower from last year through early this year. According to the report released by the reserve bank's research team, the price level for 67 categories of goods was 2.9 percentage points higher as of February due to the tariffs. The research team estimated that without those tariffs, prices for the goods studied would have fallen by nearly 1%.
This report represents the clearest evidence to date of how Trump's tariff policies have affected household consumer spending. Tariffs were a central policy plank of his previous campaign and his second term. Economists had broadly expected that imposing tariffs would push prices higher, but frequent policy changes and a lack of transparency in corporate pricing mechanisms made it difficult to estimate the actual impact precisely. The study did not disclose which specific product categories were included among the 67 evaluated. According to the research, for every 1 percentage point increase in average tariffs, consumer goods prices rise by roughly 0.25 percentage points after one year. The report showed that annual price increases for these dozens of goods peaked in early 2026. Due to the policy, consumers are expected to bear higher prices through 2027.
The New York Fed report noted that about two-thirds of the price increases caused by tariffs came from the direct impact of the tariffs themselves; the remaining increase stemmed from indirect knock-on effects, such as higher costs for U.S. companies that use imported components and raw materials in production. "The effect of tariffs on consumer goods prices is larger and longer-lasting than the direct effect alone would suggest," wrote the study's three authors, Mary Amiti, Sebastian Heise, and David Weinstein.
Trump had previously argued that companies should absorb the costs brought by tariffs rather than pass them on to consumers through higher prices. But the New York Fed research team found that about 26% of the tariffs imposed last year were eventually passed through gradually in the form of higher end-product prices. In February 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that several of Trump's tariffs were unconstitutional, and retailers accordingly received refunds. The White House stated that it would continue to pursue tariff policies through other means; currently, goods from many countries entering the United States generally face tariffs of about 10%, in most cases significantly lower than the previous round of tariff rates.
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