(Headline USA) Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen blamed Americans’ spending habits as the root cause of 40-year-high inflation during an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Wednesday.
Colbert asked Yellen to explain how inflation has gotten so out of hand when “two years ago everything seemed fine,” the Right Scoop reported.
Yellen, who has tried over the past two years to blame everything and everyone except the Biden administration for the U.S.’s economic woes, claimed inflation began ticking up when Americans “splurged” after the pandemic.
“So we had a rapid recovery from the pandemic. It turned out the pandemic had very special impacts on the economy,” she told Colbert.
“Remember, everybody stopped spending on services,” she continued. “They were in their homes for a year or more, they wanted to buy grills and office furniture, they were working from home, they suddenly started splurging on goods, buying technology.”
Don't blame the Biden Admin printing trillions of dollars: @SecYellen tells @StephenAtHome the real reason inflation is out of control is because Americans are "splurging" on goods; "and, remember, Russia has conducted a brutal war against Ukraine" pic.twitter.com/d0xbhA7sbH
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) December 1, 2022
The resulting supply chain “bottlenecks” also contributed to inflationary pressure, she added.
She also blamed Russia for rising gas and food prices.
“I think we can take the heat out of the economy and remember that Russia has conducted a brutal war against Ukraine and that caused gas prices to spike, it’s caused food prices to spike,” she claimed, although food prices already had begun their staggering ascent well before Russia’s February escalation of its eight-year-long war with Ukraine.
“It’s creating hardship all over the world,”Yellen continued. “We’re really trying to address those strains as well that’s another reason inflation went up and we’re trying to hold that down.”
Yellen didn’t mention at all the multitrillion-dollar spending bills that Democrats have passed and Biden has signed over the past two years.
She also downplayed concerns about a coming economic recession, suggesting the Biden administration has everything under control.
She made a similar comment this summer after the U.S.’s GDP contracted for the second consecutive quarter.
“Well, I look at all the data, and GDP will be closely watched,” Yellen said at the time.
“But I do want to emphasize: what a recession really means is a broad-based contraction in the economy,” she continued. “And even if that number is negative, we are not in a recession now, and I would, you know, warn that we should be not characterizing that as a recession,” she said.
