For the second month in a row, consumer price index inflation has accelerated, this time from 3.2% over the year ending in February to 3.5% over the year ending in March, blowing past economist expectations. Core CPI, which was expected to fall last month, instead held constant at 3.8%, nearly twice the Federal Reserve‘s maximum inflation target of 2%. On a month-by-month basis, both headline and core CPI increased by 0.4%, nearly twice what economists at Bank of America and UBS projected when surveyed by the Wall Street Journal.

Despite the Fed’s success at bringing inflation down from its near-double-digit apex in the summer of 2022, the central bank, which has been opposed by the White House’s explicitly inflationary fiscal policy, has seen its war against inflation not just stall but backslide. While we still must wait for March’s wholesale inflation and personal consumption expenditures price index, PPI nearly doubled in February, and headline PCE increased for the first time since September. Of all the Fed’s main inflation gauges, only core PCE decreased in February, in large part due to the supply-driven cooldown of the automobile market.