Is the dragon slain? Or just wounded?

Inflation has been the scourge of the economy for the last three years. It spiked from a benign 1.4% when President Biden took office in 2021 to a searing 9% some 18 months later. The Federal Reserve took aim with speedy interest rate hikes, and it seemed to work. By September, inflation was down to 2.4%, almost in the normal zone.

Then, an upward blip. The latest data shows inflation ticked back up to 2.6% in October. That could be a spot on the X-ray that turns out to be nothing. Or it could signal that inflation is making a comeback, which would scramble the outlook for interest rates, financial markets, and the policies of the incoming Trump administration.

The inflation uptick in October wasn’t a fluke based on hurricanes or other one-time anomalies. Most important goods and services categories rose, including food, energy, rent, and vehicles. This came one month after the Fed basically declared victory over inflation. In September, the Fed reversed monetary policy and started cutting interest rates, signaling that the time had come to worry more about keeping growth humming than about getting prices down.

The Fed is staying the course for now. It cut short-term rates again on Nov. 14 and may do so again at its next policy meeting in December. But the odds of more rate cuts are dropping, with policymakers waiting for more lab results in the form of forthcoming inflation data.

“Inflation might soon be front-page news again,” Capital Economics announced in a Nov. 13 analysis. The forecasting firm argues that the currently inflationary trend is OK, but the future outlook is more worrisome — in large part because of what Donald Trump plans to do once he takes office next January.

At least two elements of Trump’s agenda are inflationary: new tariffs on imports and the mass deportation of undocumented migrants. Tariffs are taxes that raise the cost of imported goods directly. Deporting migrants would reduce the size of the labor force, especially targeting lower-wage workers. Replacing them with workers who might demand higher pay — or with costly machines — would raise costs one way or another, with producers passing as much as they could on to consumers.

A third inflation concern is Trump’s desire to cut taxes further, which can have a stimulus effect by putting more money in people’s pockets, boosting spending and demand and sometimes leading to higher prices.

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“Given all that President-elect Trump has promised to do quickly — such as hike tariffs, cut taxes further and slash immigration — one can easily foresee a re-acceleration of inflation next year,” Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at Economic Outlook Group, wrote on Nov. 13. “The Federal Reserve is now in a real quandary.”

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