The theme of the economic week might be summed up as we'll see.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace.

In Baltimore, I'm Amy Scott in for Kai Rizdahl. It's Friday, July 18th. Good to have you with us.

So here we are at the end of the week. A pretty interesting one in the U.S. economy where some of the big questions about tariffs and the Fed remain TBD.

And here with us to make sense of it all, or at least as much

of it as we can get to in roughly six and a half minutes, are Sudip Reddy at MSNBC and

Anna Swanson at the New York Times. Hey, you two. Hey, Amy.

Hi, Amy. All right. So, Sudeep, we saw this week the first real evidence that the Trump tariffs are

showing up in consumer prices.

How concerning is the CPI number we got?

You know, just having evidence is so important right now.

The signs were limited.

There were some in toys and furniture,

and some apparel. That's to be expected when tariffs go up like this. The real question

for inflation is whether these are one-time price increases, which means they could probably be

manageable, or whether this starts the effect of price increases feeding on each other, which

becomes runaway inflation. We saw this take shape a little bit in 2021, certainly not anywhere

close to this scale now as it was back then, but that led to a whole feedback loop that had

more prices rising and labor costs rising and all these things that became

just so untenable. And the Fed is still living with the consequences of that and trying to

avoid having that same problem come up again. Anna, what do you think? I mean, for now, at least

the Trump administration is promising higher tariffs starting on on August 1st, without many of the promised deals in sight. What is the end goal here?

...