Hello and welcome to the Reason Roundtable. I'm Peter Suterman, filling in for Matt Welch who

was watching a bad movie on an airplane and crying again. Today I'm joined by my regular

co-panelists, Catherine Minguward and Nick Gillespie as well as special guest,

Reason's very own Eric Baim. Everybody say hello? Howdy. Hello. Hey, happy Juneteenth,

everybody. Happy Juneteenth, happy Father's Day, happy Monday folks. So today we are going to talk

about inflation again and what it means for both Joe Biden and Congress. It's timely and relevant,

so we are going to call this segment keeping up with currency events. No. Last week, yep.

Last week we saw the release of the latest monthly data from the consumer price index.

That index showed inflation up 4% in the year leading up to May. The slowest rate of price

increases in more than two years. Inflation was down considerably from the previous month when it

rose 4.9%, it was also down from a peak last summer of about 9% to 10% when inflation was rising

faster than at any other time during my own lifetime. This cooling follows a series of aggressive

interest rate hikes from the Federal Reserve, which has said repeatedly that it intends to clamp

down on a rapid price hikes by raising interest rates. For the last year, the Central Bank has

attempted to strike a tricky balance, engineering what some have referred to as a soft landing,

in which inflation cools, but the US economy does not enter a recession. This has been a historically

difficult task. And yet, inflation is down, at least from its peak, and at least for the moment,

and we are not currently in a recession as far as we know. Some observers are now suggesting

that the Fed has actually achieved, if not the impossible, than the unlikely, a kind of

immaculate disinflation, in which price hikes level off without serious harm to the rest of the

economy. So did the Federal Reserve's interest rate hikes maybe actually kind of sort of work?

Before we answer that question, I want to go to Eric and fill in some backstory here.

...