Incendiary Inflation

Donald Trump just lit the world economy on fire

By Max from UNFTR

3.3%. That’s where inflation stands after the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the March CPI report. Highest in two years. Hottest single-month jump in four years. Gasoline rose twenty-one percent in one month. But the scariest part is what the inflation figures mean going forward.

Let’s go back. When Joe Biden took office in January 2021, the post-COVID inflation wave was just beginning. By June 2022, CPI had surged to 9.1 percent — the highest reading since November 1981. Forty-year high. The Fed, under Jerome Powell, responded with the most aggressive rate-hiking cycle in a generation — taking rates from near zero all the way to 5.25 percent. There’s a camp out there that claims this medicine worked, a mild nod to the Volcker strategy of yesteryear.

Others say that the COVID inflation spike was the result of corporate greed and supply chain shocks and therefore uncorrelated from traditional forces of supply and demand and therefore the interest rate hike was beside the point. I fall into the latter camp, for what it’s worth.