And the I am

I am Bill Crystal. Welcome back to Conversations. I'm very pleased to be joined again today by Jason Furman with whom we had an excellent conversation about seven months ago on the

economy that stands up well.

Jason was chair of the Council of Economic Advisors for for President Obama's I think almost

entire second term I think you were there for all eight years of the Obama

administration got us out of the 2008 crisis laid the groundwork for a strong

economy which then benefited President Trump so thanks a lot for that.

That was really a good, no good deed goes unpunished, you know.

So anyway, and now, and more importantly than all this is now the now teaches act 10 the famous introductory

economic course at Harvard so Jason thanks for thanks for joining me again

thanks for having me I had a lot of fun last time so it was happy to come back. Great okay well I hope we

have fun or at least be enlightening and destructive so we really focused last

time on inflation I think you were worried that it wouldn't come down fast enough to let the Fed ease further and that it might just stay higher than we would like.

So where are, where sort of have we been and where are we just on the true true inflation so

to be the true rate of inflation then we can talk a little bit the political

psychology of inflation. Yeah so inflation has come down much more than I expected.

There's still some reasons to be nervous, but before I get to the reasons to be nervous,

let's talk about the reasons to feel good about it. In terms of first of all

underlying inflation, the best prediction about what's going to happen in the future,

over the last 12 months it's been 3.9 percent, but 12 months is a long time.

Most of the inflation in that actually happened a long time ago.

Over the last three months at an annual rate it's been 3%. Over the last one month it's been 1.8% at an annual

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