At the FOMC press conference following the March 18, 2026 meeting, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell was asked about inflation by Colby Smith of the New York Times. His answer, verbatim from the official transcript: “And if you look at total inflation—sorry, total core inflation, it's about 3 percent, and some big chunk of that, between a half and three-quarters, is actually tariffs, so we're looking for progress on that.”
Read as percentage points, that puts roughly a half to three-quarters of a point of core inflation on tariffs. The Fed's own staff reached a compatible figure independently: a FEDS Note published April 8, 2026 estimated that tariffs raised core PCE prices by 0.8% through February 2026, with pass-through effectively complete.
On oil, Powell said in his opening statement that near-term inflation expectations had risen, “likely reflecting the substantial rise in oil prices caused by the supply disruptions in the Middle East.”
Two qualifications belong on this record. First, Powell never said “Trump.” He said tariffs, and he referred to “the Administration” once, saying it planned to get tariff rates back up after the Supreme Court decision. Asked about Trump's claim that oil prices and inflation would fall rapidly once the war ended, he said, “I don't have a forecast on that,” and he noted the earlier Ukraine oil shock “was also a consequence of military action,” treating both as generic supply shocks rather than as one president's doing.
Second, and more important, he explicitly refused the framing that tariffs equal inflation. Asked about it by Courtenay Brown, he said: “I'm not certain; I'm uncertain. But just, if you think about what it is, it's a one-time increase in the price of a good, right? And what inflation is is ongoing increases in prices this year, next year, the year after. That's what inflation is. It's not a one-time price increase. There's a very, very big difference.”
Correction (October 14, 2026): This entry previously said Powell referred to “the Administration” twice; the transcript shows he used the word once, and the other use was in Courtenay Brown's question. It described the April 2026 FEDS Note as estimating tariffs added 0.8 percentage points to core PCE inflation; the note estimates tariffs raised the core PCE price level by 0.8% through February 2026. A key fact calling the Supreme Court's tariff ruling a finding of unconstitutionality, and one saying tariffs already collected kept driving prices up after the ruling, went beyond the sources and have been rewritten to what the transcript and CNN report. The “big chunk” quotation now matches the official transcript's punctuation.