Is this time different?
In watching to Jerome Powell’s press conference yesterday I was struck by the number of times he said this is not a normal business cycle.
The inflation that we originally got was very much a collision between very strong demand and hard supply constraints, not something that you really have seen in prior, you know, in business cycles.
And
I think it's -- because this is not like the other business cycles in so many ways. It may well be that as -- that it will take more slowing than we expect, than I expect to get inflation down to 2 percent.
And
this is not a standard business cycle where you can look at the last 10 times there was a global pandemic and we shut the economy down, and Congress did what it did and we did what we did.
There is some logic to that statement. We have never shut down the entire global economy or printed so much money in such a short period of time. The clear conclusion Powell is taking in predicting a soft landing is that inflation really is transitory.
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