In normal times, the Federal Reserve would more or less ignore an oil price shock like the one we’re in now.
Oil is notoriously volatile, and high prices inevitably come down to earth after too long, making any Fed policy action on energy prices more or less moot.
But these aren’t normal times.
Fed Chair Jerome Powell on Wednesday noted that tariffs – another economic annoyance the Fed typically “looks through,” to use the fedspeak term – had already clouded the central bank’s ability to see what’s going on.
If you think of tariffs as a translucent sheet of glass and