Prices across the economy fell to an annual increase of 5 percent, down from 6 percent annually in February, according to data from the Labor Department.

On a monthly basis, inflation rose 0.1 percent after rising 0.4 percent in February and 0.5 percent in January

Economists had been expecting inflation to land at 5.1 percent annually and for it to have increased by 0.2 percentage points in March, so the numbers are just slightly better than expectations.

Inflation has been coming down since the middle of last year when it topped out at 9.1 percent in June following a quantitative tightening program by the Federal Reserve.

The Fed has raised interest rates nine times in a row since last March in the fastest tightening cycle since the last time inflation spiked during the Nixon administration.

But Fed officials have been sending different signals about what the U.S. central bank should do next.

“I think that at moments of financial stress like this, the right monetary policy is really caution and watchfulness and prudence,” Chicago Fed president Austin Goolsbee said Tuesday, echoing many economists who have been calling for the Fed to take a break on rate hikes.

New York Fed President John Williams said Tuesday in an interview with Yahoo Finance that the bank still has more work to do to bring down prices and that “inflation is still very high.”

“Jobs growth is actually quite strong still,” he said. “We are seeing some slowing in the demand for labor. But the demand for labor is still very strong.”

The Fed aims to cool inflation through the labor market since wages constitute the largest chunk of prices, along with input costs and markups. Wage growth and and profit margins have been falling but inflation has generally outpaced wage growth during the recovery of the pandemic, with higher profits keeping prices higher for longer.

That’s not true for the lowest-earning workers, however. Wages on the low end of the spectrum have actually been outpacing inflation and delivering workers a higher real wage.

Some economists have labeled the current inflation a “sellers’ inflation” to distinguish it from the “wage-price spiral” inflation that took place in the 1970s and resulted in wage and price freezes.