(Headline USA) Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen admitted this week that she regrets dismissing inflation as “transitory” back in 2021.
“I regret saying it was transitory [inflation],” Janet Yellen told Fox Business correspondent Edward Lawrence.
“It has come down,” she continued, before launching into some Clintonesque semantic wordplay to qualify her mea culpa. “But I think transitory means a few weeks or months to most people, and it’s lasted longer than that.”
Yellen made her now-infamous prediction in June 2021 that rising inflation rates would be only temporary—a prediction that she continued to double-down on for an entire year before finally admitting in June 2022 that she was mistaken.
“We have in recent months seen some inflation, and we—at least on a year-over-year basis—will continue, I believe through the rest of the year, to see higher inflation rates, maybe around 3%,” Yellen said at the time. “But I personally believe that this represents transitory factors.”
Inflation rates eventually went on to peak at 9%—although some suspect they may have gone higher, based upon the particular gauges used to measure—and still remain well above the 1.9% rate President Joe Biden inherited when he first took office.
Data released by the Labor Department this week showed inflation climbing back up to 3.2% in recent months due to an increase in gas prices and rent.
Despite the indications in January and February that it may be back on the rise, Yellen insisted yet again that the uptick was transitory and that inflation rates would continue to come down.
She also continued to show a fundamental lack of comprehension regarding the root causes of inflation.
“The single biggest contributor to inflation is housing costs. And, we can see when we look at the market for new rental apartments, that in many parts of the country, rental prices for new apartments have actually declined, overall, flat to slightly down,” Yellen told Lawrence. “It takes a while for that to filter into the CPI.”
While most would agree that the leading cause of inflation is, in fact, the devaluation of the dollar caused by excessive government spending and the subsequent minting or creation of unbacked currency to offset it, Yellen has denied this in the face of all supporting evidence.
Senator Ron Johnson: "Would you agree those are the top three causes of inflation? Deficit spending, high energy costs, and supply dislocations?"
YELLEN: "I don't believe the deficit spending is one of the main causes of inflation."
Senator Ron Johnson: "You don't?!" pic.twitter.com/rxCVJtgbMx
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) March 16, 2023
The Biden administration has repeatedly denied any responsibility for the high inflation rates, with Biden instead blaming corporations for “price-gouging.”
Citing a report that consumer costs have jumped by 18% since he took office, Biden said earlier this year that the responsibility lay with companies to lower their costs.
“We’ve made progress, but we have more work to do,” Biden said. “Let me be clear to any corporation that has not brought their prices back down, even as inflation has come down, even supply chains have been rebuilt: It’s time to stop the price gouging and give the American consumer a break.”
