The Biden Administration has finally accepted some blame for the ongoing inflation that they helped fuel, and like a good soldier, Janet Yellen has taken the spear for her boss, President Biden. President Biden was obviously anxious to make good on a progressive agenda after his inauguration, pushing his major spending bills, and he pushed through a party line vote on his $1.9T Covid relief bill in the spring of last year, and while unable to get BBB, he received somewhat bipartisan support for his $1.2T infrastructure bill. All this additional spending, coming on top of large spending by the Trump Administration in 2020 and fully monetized by the Federal Reserve (and exacerbated by supply issues), has led to much more than “transient” inflation. Mr. Biden was repeatedly warned of the inflationary consequences of his spending plans, yet he steadfastly ignored this sound counsel. So Mr. Biden trotted out his own economic team to carry the water, to include Treasury Secretary Yellen. I’ve suggested in recent blog posts that you can’t trust someone like Janet Yellen, Ph.D. economist that she is, to be speaking as a professional economist–she is in an inherently political position. So her assessment that inflation would not be a problem should have been taken with a big grain of salt. Nevertheless, with inflation raging and the political fallout of that still to come, someone had to take the blame, and it was Ms. Yellen.

So why am I joining Ms. Yellen in being wrong? Well, since she is a committed Keynesian, I’ve asserted previously on this blog that Janet Yellen has never met an inflation she didn’t like. I was wrong about that–at least prospectively; she has finally helped create one that she is not in favor of! But don’t worry; Mr. Biden will be the one to pay the political price for his malfeasance. November is a comin’.