We highlighted in Friday’s Hotline the many consumer items that are falling in price – hotels, airline flights, pork chops, cell phones, etc.

Now let’s look at where prices have risen the most. Here’s a list:

What do these products have in common? The majority of these high inflation items were hit with tariffs that were as high as 50%. That list includes coffee, beef, frozen fish, jewelry, bananas, and flowers.

We have here a useful real-world economics lesson: Tariffs don’t cause overall inflation – as an overall increase in the CPI is a result of too much money – but they do cause relative price increases.  We know this to be true because to alleviate the negative effects of the beef and coffee price hikes, Trump recently slashed or suspended the tariffs.