In his testimony yesterday, Jerome Powell said he uses a table of the last twelve months of 12-month readings of inflation. In other words, year-over-year readings.
It showed him no evidence of inflation coming down, in other words, of inflation being "transitory".
"We're exactly where we were a year ago." In other words, yep, inflation is raging. It's not transitory.
If you aren't appalled by that, I don't know what to say.
In April 2021 inflation year over year was already at the 2008-level of bad, and the Fed chair decided to wait and see if it became a "problem".
He waited a year, until Mar 2022, to begin raising the main interest rate.
I'm sure the reason is that in April 2021 he was focused on the pandemic as the number one problem. Vaccine uptake reached its crescendo that month, and Jay was praising the COVID stimulus orgy to restart the economy.
But the pandemic wasn't his job. Stable prices is his job, and he let it slide because of the extraordinary circumstances.
Now we're in a whole other big mess. Gutting the bond market is going to be life-changing for far longer than the pandemic will be.
Here's the video from yesterday with the key interchange.
This is Trump's boy, by the way.
