The latest inflation numbers, released Friday, showed a one-month drop in prices. Inflation hawks, like Jason Furman, insist that one good month doesn’t reverse a trend, and urge the Fed to impose yet another three-quarter-point rate increase at its next meeting in September.

Higher-than-normal inflation is not over. But the slowing rate of inflation rebuts the strongest argument of the hawks—that inflation is becoming "embedded" in the economy and thus feeds on itself via expectations. And an international comparison, courtesy of EPI, shows that the core U.S. inflation rate over the past two years is below the OECD average.

Those who would crush the recovery for the sake of fighting inflation tend to be macroeconomists. They look at overall demand in the economy and do not deign to examine the micro-trends on the supply side. If they did, they would find confirmation that most of what’s driving the inflation is supply shocks.

The other day, The New York Times ran an instructive piece in which reporters sat down with the owner of a high-end restaurant in Charlotte, North Carolina, called Good Food on Montford, and examined every cost item that was causing him to raise his menu prices. With the exception of labor costs, which have increased for the restaurant by about 25 percent from 2019, virtually every other menu increase can be traced to supply chain problems or price-gouging in the context of scarce supply.

For instance, wholesale meat costs to the restaurant are way up (56 percent for steak, 50 percent for pork), but a lot of this is price-gouging by suppliers in an increasingly concentrated industry. There is also a shortage of truckers, reflecting policy failures in the regulation of trucking. It’s not clear how engineering a recession with interest rate hikes would cause more truck drivers to materialize.

Most other increased restaurant costs can be traced directly to international supply chain factors and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Global shortages translate to domestic price pressures. The restaurant’s utility bills are way up, reflecting higher global energy prices. Its cost of new refrigerators, heavily dependent on imports, is up 80 percent over three years ago.

None of this would be improved by dousing the recovery. As for the higher labor costs, the fact that Good Food now pays a line cook $16 an hour, rather than $12 an hour in 2019, partly reflects Charlotte’s tight labor market. But these wage increases are lagging the cost of living, not leading it.

Nor is it the case that increased consumer demand, in the form of increased dining out, is driving these higher meal costs. On the contrary, the higher prices are all a function of the restaurant’s own increased costs, and they scare customers away.

It would be good for conservative macroeconomists to get out of the office and have a close look at the actual economy.