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(AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File) Four economists at the Federal Reserve say the high rate of inflation in the United States compared to the rest of the world is due to the COVID-19 stimulus checks given to Americans during the pandemic. The direct payments to American citizens enlarged the money supply enormously and overheated the economy.
Larry Summers, the Harvard economist and former Treasury Secretary, has been warning about this almost since Joe Biden took his oath of office. Summers believes that massive government pandemic spending — including stimulus checks — has put too much cash into circulation while the pent-up demand from the pandemic isn’t catching up to supply.
Supply chain bottlenecks don’t help. But how bad would they have been if far more modest and targeted pandemic relief had been proposed?
Now we have the war in Ukraine effectively shutting off one-quarter of the world’s supply of grain. Food prices are going to skyrocket, and it’s going to hurt everyone.
But why is it so much worse here?
Reason.com : “Inflation rates in the United States and other developed economies have closely tracked each other historically,” the economists write in an analysis published this week. “However, since the first half of 2021, U.S. inflation has increasingly outpaced inflation in other developed countries. Estimates suggest that fiscal support measures designed to counteract the severity of the pandemic’s economic effect may have contributed to this divergence.” Inflation in the U.S. hit an annualized rate of 7.9 percent in February (data for March will be released by the Bureau for Labor Statistics next week), a 40-year high. Meanwhile, inflation in similar countries like France (3.6 percent), Germany (5.1 percent), and the United Kingdom (5.5 percent) is significantly lower, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a consortium of 38 rich-world […]
They’re Trying to Shut Us Down
Over the last several months, I’ve lost count of how many times the powers-that-be have tried to shut us down. They’ve sent hackers at us, forcing us to take extreme measures on web security. They sent attorneys after us, but thankfully we’re not easily intimidated by baseless accusations or threats. They’ve even gone so far as to make physical threats. Those can actually be a bit worrisome but Remington has me covered.
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JD Rucker