White House’s Miran Dismisses Inflation Risk From Tariff Hikes

The White House’s chief economist dismissed the idea that tariff increases will have a lasting impact on US inflation, and cited the potential for interest rates to get back down to pre-Covid levels.

“Imports are only 14% of the economy — the ability of those types of things to move the needle on inflation are limited,” Stephen Miran, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s Surveillance. “We have been introducing tariffs since day-one of this administration. And what we have seen is tariffs have started to come up” yet there’s “been no real meaningful effect on inflation.”