Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told Fox Business News this week that she regrets using the word “transitory” to describe the post-Covid pandemic inflation, framing it as a good-faith prediction gone wrong. This is revisionist history.
It is clear that Yellen participated in a concerted political effort to dismiss the growing concerns about spiking pricing because Democrats were trying to ram through a massive, cronyist, welfare-state boondoggle using reconciliation. Her rhetoric mirrored that of the entire White House. Yellen didn’t misjudge anything; she followed a script. (Though it is a possibility she actually wrote it.) The entire White House was mobilized to repeat the lie.
“There’s nobody suggesting there’s unchecked inflation on the way — no serious economist,” Biden famously claimed. Former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki added that “no economist” predicted higher inflation, even as numerous respected economists, including well-known Democrats, warned that injecting trillions into a hot economy would exacerbate inflation. Psaki made that claim in November 2021. In October 2021, inflation rose at its fastest rate since 1990.
When asked about the dire predictions of economists, Yellen said, “I really don’t think that is going to happen. We had a 3.5% unemployment rate before the pandemic and there was no sign of inflation increasing.” That was on March 8, 2021. On March 1, 2021, The Wall Street Journal reported that “anxiety about inflation is at a fever pitch, among economists and in markets, where long-term interest rates have been grinding higher since President Biden unveiled plans
