It's Tuesday, April the 12th, 2020, and welcome back to Goodfellas, a Hoover Institution broadcast,

examining social, economic, political, and geopolitical concerns.

I'm Bill Whalen.

I'm a Hoover Distinguished Policy Fellow.

I'll be moderating today's show,

show featuring three of the wisest guys I know, Hoover's good fellows, as we jokingly refer to them.

That includes the historian Neil Ferguson, the economist John Cochran, the geostrategist,

Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, Hoover Institution Senior Fellows all.

And our very special guest today, former Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, Harvard University President Emeritus, currently that school's Charles W. Elliott

University professor, the renowned economist Lawrence Summers. Professor Summers, welcome to Goodfellows.

Good to be with you. So let's start with news out of Washington today, Larry. Consumer prices

rose 8.5% of the year through March

per the government's report. This is the fastest inflation rate since the end of 1981. Two questions

for you, sir. Number one, is this the high water mark as far as inflation is concerned or is there

a more pain to come? Second question, Joe Mansion blames Joe Biden in the Federal Reserve.

Joe Biden blames Vladimir Putin. I don't think he blames anybody. I think he likes this situation. Help us make sense of what's going on in terms of inflation and how we got to this point.

We have an inflation problem. We're going to have an inflation problem for a long time. I think today's number

is probably a local maximum, and it's probably going to come down over the next few months,

simply because we're not going to have gasoline prices go up by 20% in a month again. But we've got

a real inflation problem.

You know, as Neil's long books explain and the reason they're long,

major historical phenomena don't have single causes that are straightforward.

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