Americans Are Worried About Inflation

If you’ve been to the grocery store, or the gas station, or the building supply store, you know we have an inflation problem. Last month’s hotter than expected CPI confirmed what we already intuitively know. But the folks over at the Federal Reserve continue to tell us there’s nothing to worry about. They insist inflation is transitory.

Their reassurances notwithstanding, people are worried. Searches for the word “inflation” hit an all-time high on Google trends in May.

According to Google Trends, searches for the word “inflation” hit the highest level since 2004 between May 9 and May 15. That’s as far back as the data goes. Google charts trends numerically and during that time period interest in “inflation” went all the way up to 100.

If you look all the way from 2004 until the end of 2020, pretty much all the searches were pretty consistent at about 50. And now, in the beginning of 2021, is where we shot up from 50 all the way up to 100. So, something changed in 2021 that resulted in all these people all over the United States deciding independently that they were going to search inflation.”

So, why are they doing that?

Well, because they’re worried about it! If it was transitory, would they care? They care because it doesn’t seem like it’s transitory.

On the other hand, the Federal Reserve continues to ignore the signs that inflation is here to stay and pretends it’s transitory.

We can’t just pretend and play make-believe and hope the problem goes away. Because they tried that with the mortgage problem. Even though it was obvious that subprime was the tip of a huge iceberg, the Fed kept saying, ‘Don’t worry. It’s contained,’ because they were hoping that if they denied the problem, maybe it would go away. Well, they’re doing the same thing again with inflation. They’re telling all the people who are so worried about inflation, ‘Hey, don’t worry about it because it’s just transitory.’ Well, it’s as transitory as subprime was contained.

In fact, the Fed is driving inflation through its monetary policy and debt monetization.

Through the first 7 months of fiscal 2021, the US government collected about $2.1 trillion in taxes but spent about $4.1 trillion. That means $2 trillion was borrowed and basically funded by the Federal Reserve. And these are the official numbers. The unofficial numbers are even worse.

And consider this: the deficit through the first 7 months of 2021 is higher than the first 7 months of 2020, which included the depth of the COVID recession.

The government is spending even more money and running even bigger deficits now when the economy is supposedly in recovery than it was when it was still in recession, which again proves that there isn’t a recovery at all. It’s phony. The only reason the economy looks like it’s recovering is because the Fed is printing all this money to artificially stimulate it. But the way you see the truth is to look at the increase in prices that the Fed is still denying exists. They don’t want to acknowledge that inflation is not transitory because then they have to acknowledge that it’s the recovery that’s transitory because it doesn’t actually exist and inflation is going to kill it.”

This puts the Fed in an awkward position. Typically, the cure for a recession is inflation. But how can the Fed cure a recession caused by inflation by creating more inflation?

The hair of the dog that bit you isn’t going to work. It’s just going to make the economy sicker.