Government data points to the early stages of businesses passing on the costs of US President Donald Trump's sweeping import tariffs to consumers. Still, inflation remains well below its peak, and a debate continues over the extent to which tariffs will lead to a sustained rise in the pace of price hikes. But Americans like Yanique Clarke are feeling the pinch. Yanique, a nursing student in Manhattan who identifies as lower-income, said while shopping for groceries at a Target store this week that "prices are really drastically high" for meat, vegetables and fruit. "It's quite a while now, but it's getting higher," she said. And it's not just groceries. When she was recently back-to-school shopping for her 13-year-old daughter, Yanique found those prices to be "very much higher compared to previous years".

What Yanique sees in the grocery and clothing aisles aligns with data from the Labor Department, released on Thursday. In August, prices for several tariff-exposed products ticked up: clothing prices, for instance, rose 0.5% from the previous month. Grocery prices also increased 0.6% in the month to August, with particularly strong gains for coffee, a product that is sensitive to tariffs. Economists noted that the growth in food prices, which tend to be volatile, might also be driven by the Trump administration's immigration policies, as mass deportations suppress the workforce in the food and agriculture sectors and boost labour costs. But how Americans experience the rising prices for everyday goods is far from uniform. "Lower-income households are almost tailor-made to be exposed to tariffs," said Ernie Tedeschi, director of economics at the Yale Budget Lab. Mr Tedeschi was previously an economist in the Biden administration. (BBC)