The New York Federal Reserve published research confirming that tariffs added 2.9 percentage points to inflation across 67 categories of goods by February 2026. Tariffs. Not corporate greed. Not price gouging. Not supply chain disruptions that somehow only affected items with the highest profit margins.
Turns out when you tax imported goods, the cost gets passed to consumers. Revolutionary stuff from the Fed. Next they'll discover that water is wet and that your cousin who day-trades options is going to die poor.
For two years, retail traders blamed corporations for inflation while loading up on meme stocks and complaining about egg prices on Reddit. They learned nothing. The Fed just handed them a seventeen-page explanation written in the financial equivalent of crayon, and they still won't read it. They'll see "tariffs" and "inflation" in the same sentence and immediately start a thread about how Jerome Powell is conspiring with Citadel.
Sixty-seven categories of goods. That's not a rounding error. That's your entire shopping cart. Your detergent costs more because of tariffs. Your spatula costs more because of tariffs. Your dog's chew toy that he'll destroy in nine minutes costs more because of tariffs. But sure, keep blaming the Illuminati.
The best part? The research came out in 2026. We've known about these tariffs since what, 2018? The Fed took eight years to confirm what every economist already knew and what every Walmart shopper refused to believe. That's not analysis. That's a eulogy for common sense.
Somewhere right now a retail trader is reading this headline, nodding confidently, and then immediately buying puts on consumer staples because he thinks he's discovered alpha. He has not discovered alpha. He has discovered how to turn money into a tax write-off with extra steps.
Photo by LSE Library on Unsplash
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