Moves by US companies to shift the cost of President Donald Trump’s tariffs to their customers risk complicating monetary policy decisions as the Federal Reserve seeks to keep inflation steady, the central bank’s policymakers have warned.

Raphael Bostic, president of the Atlanta Fed, told the Financial Times that he believed the US was at an “inflection point”, where higher tariffs on products such as steel and aluminium would start to be felt by consumers.

“An increasing number of firms are telling us that they are going to start passing the cost increases through and they will be reflected in final goods prices,” he said in an interview on the sidelines of the Kansas City Fed’s annual conference in Jackson Hole. “Businesses have told me that they have been able to absorb a fair amount of the price increases to date but that their ability to do that is diminishing.”