Higher prices.

That’s the answer if the question is about the macro read-through of Donald Trump’s latest and, he’d surely say, “greatest” tariff regime.

Over the next several days, analysts across Wall Street will be back at work trying to calculate, out to the second decimal, the impact of trade levies, retaliatory duties and spiraling escalations on US inflation and the ramifications for Fed policy.

It’ll be number-crunching mostly for the sake of it. There are (far) too many unknowns and moving parts to make precision calculations possible, but from a big-picture perspective, and assuming the “war” isn’t over before it starts, the implication of this weekend’s developments is that inflation’s biased to the upside, which means the Fed’s likely done cutting.

“In the short run, tariffs are inflationary,” Rabobank’s Philip Marey wrote, in a special report, adding that the scope of tariff-related price increases to consumers “depend[s] on exchange rate adjustments, monopoly power of foreign exporters, monopsony power of domestic importers and trade diversion,” but one way or another, Americans can probably expect “a rebound of consumer price growth.”

Over the long run, Marey went on, Trump might succeed in compelling foreign producers to move “some” production to the US, but that’ll be “at a higher cost” too, because “the comparative advantages that exist on the North American continent are no longer being fully exploited.”

As I discussed in what, for me, was gentle language over the weekend, Americans will almost surely end up worse off on net running a protectionist trade agenda. Marey spelled it out. “The price distortions imposed by the tariffs will lead to a restructuring of supply chains that would be sub-optimal in an economically integrated North America,” he wrote Sunday, noting that although Trump may manage to “bring back some manufacturing and agriculture jobs, all economic sectors in the US will pay higher prices.”

As for the Fed, Marey said Trump’s weekend pronouncements mean it’s no longer possible to side-step the issue or otherwise pretend the elephant in the room’s merely theoretical. “No more excuses,” he said, exhorting the Fed to “run your models, update your forecasts and start doing what you were supposed to do: Developing forward-looking monetary policy instead of burying your head in the sand.”