Consumer prices rose briskly in January, extending a recent pattern of increases at the start of the year, reported the Wall Street Journal. “The Labor Department said Wednesday that prices rose last month 0.5% from December on a seasonally adjusted basis. That was the largest monthly increase since August 2023 and well ahead of economists’ expectations for a milder increase of 0.3%,” wrote the WSJ.

According to the New York Times, inflation has “subsided drastically since cresting just above 9% in 2022, but progress in recent months has been much more sporadic.”

“Economists have said the import tariffs that Trump has started to impose could make inflation worse. Trump’s allies have said other moves, such as deregulating businesses and boosting energy production, could offset the effects of higher goods prices,” said the WSJ.

Fed officials, who have long said the road to getting annual inflation back to their 2% target could be bumpy, expressed concern about the latest report, wrote the Washington Post.

“This is a pretty significant bump,” Raphael Bostic, president of the Atlanta Fed, said in an interview. He characterized the hotter reading as a “significant rebound” from the direction that inflation was headed early last year.

Per the WSJ, many companies tend to reset their prices in January to reflect rising costs from the previous year. The turn-of-the-year bump has been especially large in each of the past three years following the outbreak of inflation in 2021.

Looking to food inflation, there are multiple factors at play, according to the WSJ. “Bird flu is killing chickens, cutting egg supplies and sending wholesale prices to a record; extreme heat and dry weather in the world’s coffee-growing regions have sent the cost of brews surging; and chocolate and cereal makers have raised prices for their products, too.”

Grocery prices in December 2024 were roughly 28% higher than they were in 2019, according to the Labor Department.