This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Saturday, April 23rd, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

How much grace is due to the Federal Reserve officials in their movements to contain the scourge of inflation.

Will Luther is a professor of economics at Florida Atlantic University.

We spoke earlier this month in Las Vegas.

As it became clear that inflation was taking hold and would be with us for longer than a short time period,

I watched a lot of Bloomberg and the The host, on Bloomberg, were unfortunately having to ask their guests,

now when you say transitory, what do you mean?

And then the word episodic came into the conversation and said,

oh, this is an episode of inflation that we're having right now when do you

feel it was beyond dispute that the inflation that the United States was facing was going to be with us for a while.

Well, by the beyond dispute, certainly by the end of November, the very end of November,

when Chair Powell says we're no longer going to use the word transitory.

That seems to me a point after which no one, absolutely no one can think that this was going to be transitory.

You know, I will confess that in January of 2021 I wasn't worried about inflation.

We had just experienced a pretty big negative real shock that that should push prices up and there was no reason to think that that real shock, which was because we had a pandemic

and the government shut down production in some sections for a couple months there. There was no reason to think that that was going to last forever.

And so the increased prices shouldn't last forever either.

Going through the spring as prices continued to rise.

It was really only around May that it was clear that prices had exceeded the 2% trajectory plotted from January 2020 just prior to the pandemic.

And even then I thought, you know, inflation not that that high that we should have some

inflation by July very clear at that point that we have gone well past just catching up to that 2%

...