WASHINGTON — In a humbling disclosure delivered to no one in particular Wednesday morning, the Federal Reserve confirmed that the inflation shock it had spent the better part of eight months hunting across consumer-price data, producer-price data, and an increasingly exotic array of nowcasting indicators was, in fact, in the left pocket of its spring jacket, where it had been since approximately mid-April.

A senior official at the central bank, asked how the shock had ended up there, paused for a long time before answering. “We were going to a thing,” the official explained. “We took the jacket off. We put it back on. We forgot about the thing in the pocket. We made several speeches about the thing being missing. At one point we revised the dot plot.”

The official conceded that the rediscovery process had begun Tuesday evening, when Chair Marlene Lindgren reached into the jacket for what she described as “a different thing entirely” and found instead a small, lightly used inflation shock, approximately the size of a tube of lip balm, with a partial supply-side component and a residual demand-side rump.

“It was not a clean rediscovery,” the official said. “There was lint. There was a receipt from a small bakery in Jackson Hole. But it was unmistakably the shock we had been looking for. The wartime risk premium fingerprint is fairly distinctive.”

The Board of Governors immediately convened a closed-session meeting to discuss the implications. Several committee members reportedly asked whether the discovery counted as new information for the purposes of the June meeting; others questioned whether the shock, having been in a pocket for four weeks, should now be considered a structurally different shock than the one that had originally been mislaid.

A senior research economist at the New York Fed, asked whether the discovery would prompt a revision of the staff’s medium-term inflation forecast, said the question was “fundamentally a definitional one.” The economist explained that if the shock had been in the pocket the whole time, it was unclear whether the four weeks of forecasts produced without reference to it should be considered to have included it implicitly or to have missed it entirely.

“There is a non-trivial methodological question here about whether you can have a shock that is in a coat pocket but is also, in some sense, reflected in the data,” the economist said. “We will address this in a forthcoming working paper.”

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which had earlier in the morning released the April Consumer Price Index, declined to comment on the rediscovery beyond a terse statement noting that the agency’s index “measures prices, not pockets, and does so on a calendar-month basis.”

A spokesperson for the Federal Reserve confirmed that the jacket in question would be retained for institutional purposes and that the pocket would be inspected weekly going forward as part of an updated quality-assurance protocol. The other pocket, the spokesperson said, contains a small amount of cash, a metro card, and what is believed to be either a 2024 recession risk or a half-eaten granola bar.

Asked whether other central banks would follow with similar pocket audits, a senior official at the European Central Bank declined to comment but was photographed Wednesday afternoon emerging from a Frankfurt conference room with both hands deep in a tan blazer.

Markets reacted with restraint. Two-year Treasury yields fell three basis points on the rediscovery announcement, then rose two basis points on the clarification that the shock had been quite small, then fell one basis point on a separate disclosure that the granola bar might also be an inflation shock.

The Fed’s next decision is scheduled for June 18. A senior official said the institution was “fully focused” on the upcoming meeting and would, going forward, take steps to ensure that no further policy-relevant shocks were inadvertently stored in outerwear.

“The lesson is that the data is in the data,” the official said, before pausing and looking, very briefly, at the pocket.