Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell claimed Wednesday “nobody” thought that inflation would reach the levels it did, but several economists, including former Obama administration appointees, raised alarms earlier.
“Nobody expected inflation to be this strong,” Powell said during a Wednesday event at the Brookings Institute.
“How could an administration loaded with savvy political and economic hands have gotten this critical issue so wrong?” former Obama administration official Steven Rattner wrote in a Nov. 16, 2021 op-ed in The New York Times. “They can’t say they weren’t warned — notably by Larry Summers, a former Treasury secretary and my former boss in the Obama administration, and less notably by many others, including me.”
