Nearly half of American manufacturers and service firms that have paid tariffs say they are not done raising prices, according to a new business survey from the New York Federal Reserve. The finding lands at a moment when senior Fed officials have been publicly treating tariff-driven inflation as a one-time adjustment that should fade on its own.

The gap between what the Fed has been telling markets and what businesses are actually doing with their price sheets is widening. For gold investors and anyone else watching inflation risk, the New York Fed’s own data suggests the tariff inflation story has more chapters to come.

The survey, reported by Yahoo Finance on July 9, found that 44% of manufacturers and 47% of service firms expect to raise prices further because of tariffs. Some of those firms indicated they plan to push through increases six months or more into the future. The research was authored by New York Fed economists Jaison Abel, Mary Amiti, Richard Deitz, Sebastian Heise, and Nick Montalbano.

The “One-Time” Assumption Meets Reality

The central tension in this story is between a convenient assumption and a stubborn fact pattern. Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh said before taking the chair earlier this year that he believed tariffs would produce a one-time price increase, not prolonged inflation. Fed Governor Chris Waller has repeatedly argued the Fed should “look through” tariff impacts as temporary. New York Fed President John Williams told Fox Business earlier this week that while tariff-related inflation is still showing up, he thinks it is near its peak.

The New York Fed’s own economists appear less certain. Their language is careful but pointed:

“While economists and policymakers often expect that price increases due to tariffs will constitute a one-time price-level adjustment, what ‘one-time’ means in practice may be a drawn-out affair, especially when the tariffs change frequently.”

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That is a polite way of saying the models are wrong. Or at least incomplete. When tariff policy keeps shifting, businesses cannot absorb the full cost in a single repricing event. They spread it out. And each new round of policy changes restarts the clock.

The survey authors made the point explicitly:

“Our business surveys suggest that, in an ever-changing tariff environment, many firms are spreading price increases across extended periods, meaning that inflationary pressures due to tariffs may well last for some time to come.”

This isn’t a fringe view from outside critics; it comes from inside the Federal Reserve system, published under the New York Fed’s own banner. The disconnect between the institution’s research arm and its leadership’s public messaging is hard to miss.

Consumers Have Only Seen the Beginning

The survey data gains sharper edges when placed alongside other recent research. Goldman Sachs said in a February 2026 note that tariffs had added roughly 0.7 percentage point to inflation over the prior ten months, with the bank’s analysts writing that companies had already passed the majority of the tariff impacts on to consumers. The same analysis projected that consumers’ share of the tariff burden would keep climbing through the year as businesses ran out of room to absorb costs internally.

The direction is simple even if the exact split is a moving target: cost pressure a business doesn’t absorb either shows up in the price a customer pays, or in thinner margins, in the form of lower investment and slower hiring. Often both.

That dynamic is visible in the most recent inflation data. The Associated Press reported on June 10 that consumer prices rose 4.2% in May from a year earlier, up from 3.8% in April, the highest reading since 2023. The Bureau of Labor Statistics attributed most of that acceleration to an energy-price surge tied to the Iran war and the disruption at the Strait of Hormuz, rather than to tariffs directly. Core prices, which strip out food and energy, rose a more moderate 2.9% year-over-year. Tariffs remain a slower-burn pressure running underneath that headline number, showing up more in core goods categories than in the volatile energy component.

As we detailed in our recent coverage of grocery prices and supply chain pressures, that goods-price pressure isn’t limited to groceries; it’s showing up across the consumer basket.

The Fed’s Credibility Problem

Former Fed Chair Jay Powell, in what was described as his second-to-last press conference in March, acknowledged the uncertainty more candidly than his successors have:

“We found that coming out of COVID, that the inflation did go away, and largely for the reasons we thought it would. But it took two years longer than we thought. And so I think we have to be humble about knowing how long it will take for tariffs to go all the way through the economy.”

Two years longer than expected. That is worth sitting with. The Fed’s track record on calling the duration of inflationary episodes is not strong. Powell himself framed the current tariff situation with similar caution, saying the main thing the Fed was looking for was “progress on inflation through a reduction in goods inflation as the one-time effects on prices of tariffs go through the system.”

But the New York Fed survey suggests the system has not finished processing those effects. Not close. If nearly half of affected firms still plan further increases, and some of them are looking six months or more out, the “one-time” framing starts to look like wishful accounting.

Newsmax reported in late May that April’s inflation data had already pushed price growth to its highest rate in three years. Cheryl Venable, the Atlanta Fed’s interim president since Raphael Bostic’s retirement earlier this year, wrote in a May essay that “the time is not right to loosen policy and risk stoking further inflation” given renewed price pressures, adding that “coming off the post-COVID-19 inflation spike and price increases related to tariffs, consumers may find that they can only take so much.” New York Fed President Williams himself has said he expects tariff effects “to increase in coming months.”

That last point deserves emphasis. Williams told Fox Business that tariff inflation is near its peak. His own bank’s research team published data the same week showing firms plan to keep raising prices for months. Both statements can technically be true, but the gap between “near the peak” and “not done yet” is where purchasing power gets destroyed.

Who Pays the Tariff?

The question of who bears the cost has never been purely academic, but the data is now clear enough to settle the argument for practical purposes. A separate New York Fed study, cited by National Review, confirmed that nearly 90% of the economic burden of the 2025 tariffs fell on U.S. firms and consumers. Import prices rose nearly one-for-one with tariff rates, meaning foreign exporters did not systematically cut their prices to absorb the duties.

The administration has repeatedly cast tariffs as a way to shift costs onto foreign trading partners. The empirical record on where the tariff burden actually lands tells a different story, and that’s not a partisan read; it’s a balance-sheet reality. The tariff is collected at the border, but it is priced into domestic goods. And as earlier research on the 2018-2019 tariffs showed, the burden falls disproportionately on lower- and middle-income households as a share of income. That makes tariffs a regressive tax in practice, regardless of their stated purpose.

The corporate response is predictable and already underway. As our analysis of rising corporate markups has documented, when input costs rise, firms do not simply pass through the exact amount. Pricing power compounds. Margins get rebuilt on top of higher cost bases. That is one reason inflation tends to be stickier than models predict.

What This Means for Metals and Capital Preservation

For gold and silver investors, the implications are layered. The most immediate one is that the Fed’s ability to cut rates is constrained. If inflation is not fading as quickly as officials projected, the policy rate stays higher for longer. That keeps real yields elevated and, in theory, works against non-yielding assets like bullion.

But the second-order effect runs the other way. Persistent inflation erodes purchasing power. It undermines confidence in the currency. And it creates a credibility problem for the institution tasked with maintaining price stability. When the Fed’s own research contradicts the Fed’s own messaging, the market starts to price in a wider range of outcomes.

Gold tends to perform well not just when inflation is high, but when the policy response to inflation is uncertain, delayed, or compromised by competing political pressures. That description fits the current environment closely. As we noted in our coverage of Warsh’s hawkish debut, the new chairman’s rhetoric has leaned toward tighter policy. But rhetoric and action are different things, especially when the economy is absorbing a rolling tariff shock.

The key variables to watch:

  • Whether the share of tariff costs passed to consumers keeps climbing as businesses run out of room to absorb costs internally
  • Whether core PCE inflation tracks toward or above 3% by year-end
  • Whether the Fed holds rates steady, cuts despite inflation, or is forced to consider tightening
  • Whether the “one-time” framing quietly disappears from official Fed communications

Each of those outcomes has direct consequences for real yields, dollar confidence, and the relative attractiveness of hard assets. A Fed that is behind the curve on inflation, even modestly, tends to be good for gold over time. A Fed that is seen as politically constrained from acting is even better for it.

Meanwhile, the consumer is getting squeezed from both ends. Prices are rising. Wages are not keeping pace with the tariff-driven component. And as our reporting on renter financial stress has shown, the strain is already visible in household balance sheets well before the full tariff pass-through arrives.

The Slow Burn

Omair Sharif, chief economist at Inflation Insights, reacted to the May inflation data in comments reported by the Associated Press: “I don’t think we’re anywhere near out of the woods yet.”

That framing matters: the tariff shock isn’t a one-time event that’s already been absorbed; it’s a rolling process with a long tail. The New York Fed’s survey puts hard numbers on what many businesses already know: they are not done raising prices, and they may not be done for months.

The Fed can call it transitory. It can call it a one-time adjustment. It can look through it. But the grocery bill, the appliance receipt, and the price tag on a pair of shoes do not care what the Fed calls it. They just go up.

When the institution responsible for price stability cannot agree with itself on whether prices are done rising, the case for owning something outside the system gets a little stronger.