Good news. Unfortunately, it’s too stale to matter, because in a Donald Trump presidency, anything that happened more than five minutes ago’s irrelevant.

Core consumer prices in the US rose just 0.1% MoM in March. The unrounded print was 0.057%, the slowest since January of 2021 and very nearly low enough to round to unchanged.

Consensus expected a 0.3% readout on underlying price growth, so this counted as a meaningful undershoot. This pace, if sustained, would bring the 12-month rate down to 2% (i.e., the Fed’s target) fairly expeditiously.

The YoY read was 2.8%, likewise the slowest since Q1 2021, and two tenths below the 3% consensus.

Air fares (-5.3%), car insurance and used vehicles all showed a decline and, notably, the shelter gauge rose just 0.2%. Unrounded, the MoM shelter print was the coolest since August of 2021. OER, though, rose double that pace, and the 0.4% readout was the briskest since October. The rent gauge rose 0.3%.

On the headline index, prices actually fell last month. The -0.05% MoM print on the all-items index was the most negative since April of 2020, when the consensus across the macro community was that COVID would be the biggest deflationary shock since the Great Depression.

Needless to say, a lot of that was the energy index, which fell 2.4% thanks to a more than 6% monthly decline on the gas gauge, which Trump will invariably take credit for. YoY, headline inflation ran just 2.4% in March.

The news wasn’t so good in the grocery aisle, where prices rose, thanks again to eggs, but also to beef, chicken and fish.

The best news were the so-called “supercore” measures, which track services price growth excluding housing. The Fed monitors a PCE-based version, but you can back out two similar numbers from the CPI release. Those — core prices ex-shelter and core prices ex-OER/rent — printed -0.06% and -0.241%, respectively. Folks, those are the coolest readings on those key metrics in half a decade.

I won’t mince words: This was the best CPI report of the post-pandemic era, bar none, or at least at first glance. And yet, Trump’s rendered it more or less meaningless. Were it not for those cursed, cursed tariffs, this is the kind of CPI release that would’ve prompted the Fed to start cutting again.

“Had it not been for ‘Liberation Day,’ the trajectory of the inflation data would represent meaningful progress toward the FOMC’s 2% objective,” BMO’s Ian Lyngen said. “Alas, the data is stale in the context of the fresh round of levies,” he added. “March’s inflation numbers are far less relevant for investors’ forward inflation projections in light of the array of new tariffs, paused or otherwise.”