Fresh off the worst inflation shock in decades, Americans are once again bracing for higher prices.

Expectations about future inflation have started to move up, according to metrics closely watched by officials at the Federal Reserve. So far, the data, including a consumer survey from the University of Michigan and market-based measures of investors’ expectations, does not suggest that price pressures are perceived to be on the verge of spiraling out of control.

But the recent jump has been significant enough to warrant attention, stoking yet more uncertainty about an economic outlook already clouded by President Donald Trump’s ever-evolving approach to trade, immigration, taxation and other policy areas. On Tuesday, a survey from The Conference Board showed that consumer confidence fell sharply in February and inflation expectations rose as Americans fretted about the surging price of eggs and the potential impact of tariffs.

If those worries persist, it could be a political problem for Trump, whose promise to control prices was a central part of his message during last year’s campaign. It would also add to the challenge facing policymakers at the Fed, who are already concerned that progress against inflation is stalling out.

“This is the kind of thing that can unnerve a policymaker,” Jonathan Pingle, who used to work at the Fed and is now chief economist at UBS, said about the overarching trend in inflation expectations. “We don’t want inflation expectations moving up so much that it makes the Fed’s job harder to get inflation back to 2%.”

Most economists see keeping inflation expectations in check as crucial to controlling inflation itself. That’s because beliefs about where prices are headed can become a self-fulfilling prophecy: If workers expect the cost of living to rise, they will demand raises to compensate; if businesses expect the cost of materials and labor to rise, they will increase their own prices in anticipation. That can make it much harder for the Fed to bring inflation to heel.

That’s what happened in the 1960s and 1970s: Years of high inflation led consumers and businesses to expect prices to keep rising rapidly. Only by raising interest rates to a punishing level and causing a severe recession was the Fed able to bring inflation fully back under control.

When prices began rising rapidly in 2021 and 2022, many forecasters feared a repeat of that scenario. Instead, inflation expectations remained relatively docile — rising only modestly, and falling quickly once inflation began to ease — and the Fed was able to bring down inflation without causing a big increase in unemployment.

“The No. 1 reason why that scenario didn’t play out was that, even though inflation went up quite a bit, expected inflation by most measures only went up a little bit,” said Laurence Ball, an economist at Johns Hopkins University. “That’s the big difference between the 1970s and the 2020s.”

Now, though, there are hints that Americans are anticipating higher inflation in the years ahead. Persistent price pressures driven in part by a surge in the costs of eggs and energy-related expenses coupled with concerns about the impact of tariffs are among the factors to have pushed consumers’ expectations for inflation over the next 12 months to their highest level in more than a year, according to the long-running survey from the University of Michigan.

More concerning to economists, consumers’ expectations for inflation in the longer run experienced their biggest one-month jump since 2021 in February. The increase cut across age and income levels, suggesting inflation fears are widespread.

Expectations in the Michigan survey have risen before, only to fall back in subsequent months. And the recent results have shown a huge partisan split — inflation expectations have risen sharply among Democrats since the election, but have fallen among Republicans — leading some economists to discount the results.

Inflation expectations have also risen among political independents, however — a significant development because their assessment of the economy is typically more stable, said Joanne Hsu, who leads the Michigan survey.

Other measures paint a mixed picture. The Conference Board’s survey showed rising concerns about inflation in both January and February, but another from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in January did not. One closely watched measure of investors’ inflation expectations has been edging up, but another one has not. Both measures are based on yields on U.S. government debt — when investors expect inflation to eat away at the value of their bond holdings, they demand a greater return to make up for it.