The consumer price index out Tuesday shows inflation rose 0.6% in April and 3.8% year-over-year. It’s far cry from the Federal Reserve’s target of 2%. Much of that increase — about 40% — is because of rising energy prices.

There’s a term economists use to describe a singular and short-lived shock to prices. Maybe one you’ve heard before. One that Sean Snaith, director of the Institute for Economic Forecasting at the University of Central Florida, would use to describe the U.S. war with Iran.

“That is potentially as close to transitory as you can get,” he said.

He said the spike we’re seeing in energy prices is in theory just a blip, because the war could be resolved tomorrow. But also, maybe not.

“If this continues through the summer and into the fall then we start to see more downstream effects of higher oil and natural gas prices,” he said.

At some point, businesses will have to charge more. Gary Schlossberg, global strategist at Wells Fargo Investment Institute, said that will make inflation harder to tame.

“Even if and when the trade routes are reopened, when supply chains normalize, inflation will come down, but it could be more gradual than it might have been a few years ago,” he said.

More gradual than a few years ago because the war comes after a bunch of other economic shocks.

There’ve been tariffs, which some economists say caused transitory inflation. There was the pandemic, which the Fed famously said caused transitory inflation. How many consecutive transitory inflation events have to happen before it becomes one big pot of persistent inflation soup?

“That’s also a million-dollar question that macroeconomists would like to answer,” said Julie Smith, an economics professor at Lafayette College.

She said Americans have lived through a five-year period of big increases to the cost of necessities — housing, food, gas. They feel it and they’ve come to expect it.

“I don’t know if that just goes away if, you know, gas comes down,” Smith said.

Consumers might assume rising inflation is now a way of life. It’s a dangerous mindset because those consumers’ expectations can help drive actual inflation.

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