This is John Batchel, a conversation with my colleague and friend Joseph Sternberg, member of the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal.

He's based in London. He writes political economics and his most recent column about the debate ongoing now after the election between economists who support the explanation that the 9% inflation of 2022

that became the story of the election,

what are you going to do about it,

how are you going to solve it, why is it here?

The story of the election, according to the

Bidenomics defenders, the economists,

is that the American people didn't understand it was supply chain.

That's what made it possible to go to 9%.

And that once the supply chain was solved, all's well.

The other side of the debate is the assumption, one that I've been taught,

that it was the spending by the late Trump administration and the whole of the Biden

administration, cash flowing into America that increased inflation everywhere. The debate continues.

Here's Joe to describe the scale of it ongoing. More of this tonight. Yeah, I think there are two

factors at work here. I mean, the longer-term

problem in mainstream economics is that there's this whole developed school of thought, which

is very influential, that just downplays the influence of some of these demand-side factors

like the fiscal spending and the monetary policy. So people already, you know, a lot of professional

economists are primed to just not think that this stuff is important. And then on top of that,

you have this layer of a lot of the high-profile economists in the Democratic Party who were

big advocates of these Biden-Harris spending policies and the monetary policies that went with it

have now just gotten a big rebuke from voters. And so I think that there is kind of an incentive for

...