The US leader last week announced levies as high as 50 percent on imports from some countries, sending stock markets tumbling and bond yields rising — only to abruptly change course on all nations except China on Wednesday.
Ahead of the dramatic market movements that accompanied those levies, the consumer price index (CPI) cooled to 2.4 percent in March from a year ago, the Labor Department said in a statement — lower than economists’ estimates. On a monthly basis, inflation actually contracted 0.1 percent from a month earlier.
“The index for energy fell 2.4 percent in March, as a 6.3-percent decline in the index for gasoline more than offset increases in the indexes for electricity and natural gas,” the Labor Department said in a statement, explaining the slight decline in prices from month to month.
The food index rose 0.4 percent in March. Excluding volatile food and energy costs, inflation inched up by 0.1 percent in March from a month earlier, and by 2.8 percent over the past 12 months. This was “the smallest 12-month increase since March 2021,” the Labor Department said. It also came in below the median estimates of economists surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires and the Wall Street Journal.
