From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Free Expression with Jerry Baker.

Hello and welcome to another episode of Free Expression with me, Jerry Baker, of the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal.

This week my guest is Lawrence H. Summers, former Secretary of the Treasury, former chief

economic advisor to President Obama, former President of Harvard University, now a professor at Harvard,

and of course, one of the most eminent economists in the world, and a particularly outspoken

one. Larry Summers, thanks for joining me.

Good to be with you, Jerry.

Larry, let me start with the obvious question.

A year ago, you were one of the most vocal

people warning about the risk of inflation to the U.S. A lot of people dismiss those risks,

not least the Federal Reserve, suggesting that the inflation threat was going to be transitory.

A year later, I think it's fair to say that you've been right and they've been wrong. Are you taking

a victory lap?

Look, I wish we didn't have the inflation.

I wish we didn't have the challenges that we have now.

So I would have preferred to have been wrong.

And I think in fairness to the Federal Reserve and the administration,

it needs to be said that their views were widely tracking

the views of probably a substantial majority of economists on Wall Street and in academia.

At the time, I thought those views were misguided because it seemed to me that the level of stimulus that was being provided was entirely disproportionate to plausible estimates of the gap that had to be filled.

But mine was at that point very much a minority viewpoint.

So the data that we have now that have been coming in extremely

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