The March Consumer Price Index report, released Friday morning by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, carried the kind of headline that tends to end conversations before they begin: consumer prices rose 3.3 percent over the past year, the fastest pace in some time. Predictably, opponents of the administration reached for their prepared statements before the data had fully loaded. But a report is more than its headline, and the headline this month is not the whole story.
The number driving that 3.3 percent figure is energy. Oil prices have surged in the wake of the Iran conflict, and headline CPI was expected to be up 0.8 percent from February to March, driven in significant part by energy costs spiking due to the war. That energy shock is real and is being felt at the pump — but it is also, by most measures, an external disruption rather than an expression of underlying domestic price conditions. The Federal Reserve, economists across the ideological spectrum, and serious policymakers have long understood that you do not calibrate monetary policy or assess structural inflation by chasing oil prices up and down with every geopolitical tremor.
Which brings us to core inflation — the measure that strips out food and energy precisely because those categories are volatile and frequently distorted by events beyond the economy’s control. Core CPI, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, was forecast to rise 0.2 percent on a monthly basis and 2.7 percent year over year. The actual reading came in below that year-over-year expectation — a meaningful data point that the wailing over the headline number tends to obscure.
That the underlying economy is not yet delivering 2 percent inflation is not a secret, and no serious person should pretend otherwise. The Federal Reserve quietly raised its 2026 inflation forecast from 2.4 percent to 2.7 percent — a 30-basis-point jump representing the largest single-year upward revision in recent cycles. The Fed is watching the same pressures everyone else is. But watching is different from panicking, and the distinction matters enormously right now.
The persistent components of core inflation — shelter, medical care, services — are grinding down slowly, as they always do. The heavyweight shelter index increased 3 percent over the last year, the same pace as in January, while medical care rose 3.4 percent and personal care rose 4.5 percent. These are not new problems; they are the sticky residue of the inflationary surge that began in 2021, and they have been moving in the right direction, if slowly. Core consumer prices had reached their lowest annual reading since March 2021 in the months preceding this report. That disinflation trend is being tested, not reversed.
The political temptation on both sides is to weaponize whichever number is most convenient. Democrats point to 3.3 percent and declare catastrophe. Certain cheerleaders for the administration would prefer to wave away all bad data and focus only on core. Neither posture is honest, and neither serves the public.
The honest reading is this: an energy shock caused by a war has pushed headline inflation upward. Core inflation, while not where it needs to be, came in below expectations and remains on a trajectory that, absent the energy disruption, would still represent meaningful progress from the post-pandemic highs. FOMC voted 11-1 to hold rates steady at 3.5 to 3.75 percent, and seven of nineteen participants now see no cuts at all in 2026 — a sign that the Fed is not dismissing the risks but is also not treating this as a crisis demanding emergency action.
The Book of Proverbs instructs that “a prudent man foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself; but the simple pass on, and are punished.” The evil here is not 3.3 percent headline inflation driven by war-related energy costs. The evil would be allowing a transitory external shock to panic policymakers into either premature rate cuts or unnecessary rate hikes — either of which would do lasting damage to an economy still finding its footing.
The Federal Reserve should stay the course. The administration should stay focused on the structural reforms — energy production, deregulation, fiscal restraint — that address the conditions underlying inflation rather than the temporary distortions that dominate a given month’s report. And the media should resist the temptation to treat every CPI release as either vindication or apocalypse, depending on which faction is writing the chyrons.
Friday’s report was not good news. It was not bad news either. It was complicated news, and complicated news requires the kind of honest analysis that neither political tribe is presently inclined to provide.
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