Every day it's "Putin Price Hike", and absolutely 0 taking responsibility.
[edit] Blaming the world for the sanctions they imposed on the Russians is like seeing a bully smacking a victim yelling "stop hitting yourself" and saying "yeah! why are you hitting yourself?!"
So yeah, the Russians are responsible for large increases in the cost of oil, and food. Are there other factors at play? Sure. A global shipping crisis, a COVID outbreak and lockdowns in China. A lot of pent-up demand chasing limited supply. Snarled supply chains.
I do think we'd be much further along getting out of this if the Russians hadn't kicked off their 'special military operation.'
What are we blaming the administration for? Continuing the bi-partisan Trump-era QE cycle which allowed America the fastest-ever exit from a recession event (COVID), saving America from a lost decade?
...though the certainty that inflation is definitely 100% Biden's fault is a bit unjustified too.
When you walk into your grocery store and see consumer basics going up in price so dramatically, it's going to prompt the desire to blame, and of course Biden is a big target. Regardless of if it's fair for voters to blame Biden so heavily, they are and will.
Was Biden running the government response (or the Fed policy) when 2008 happened (when QE started, that many here are blaming for the inflation)? No, he wasn't. He wasn't even running the response for the first part of Covid. I seem to remember stimulus checks with Trump's signature on them.
One could fault Biden for the anti-drilling and anti-pipeline policies. But much of the blame is just "he's the guy currently there", so he gets the blame. "The buck stops here", and all that. It's unfair. But it happens to every president, and it's always unfair.
No, the Fed is supposed to be relatively isolated from short-run political influence to put a step of separation between government fiscal policy targeting the economy (the responsibility of Congress) from monetary policy affecting the currency (the responsibility of the Fed) except to the extent that the former effects the landscape that the latter targets, to maintain confidence in the currency by making monetization of debt unlikely.
This is very much not to prevent the elected officials of government from intervening in the economy. If anything, it frees them to do so, because the barrier against monetization of debt not only protects the currency, it protects policymakers from the perception that deficits will likely be resolved with monetization, which is a brake on fiscal policy that involves deficit spending.
Claiming they’re not responsible, or even worse, claiming that an additional $1.85T of spending will reign in inflation is beyond ridiculous: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/11/business/economy/biden-in...
The reality is everyone agrees: if you increase the money supply beyond demand for money, inflation will result. However, the demand for money is extremely difficult to model and is incredibly unpredictable. There's demand for US dollars all over the world, from dollarized economies like Venezuela and El Salvador and Panama - to European and Asian bond buyers - to unusual dollar demand curves at home, such as the sudden fear that gripped the economy during COVID that caused everyone to stuff dollars into their mattresses.
The model is far more complex than you're making it out to be.
I think it's more the former, leading to a circular argument on where the blame for that 60% lies.
No, the Fed is an independent entity similar to the supreme court. The president could fire the chair and install someone new, but I don't believe that has ever been done.
Congress isn't a person or even an institution with a unitary head, and that's at least 5 separate Congresses, several of which didn't have even approximate unity between the two houses on the issue.
And most of the promises on that came from the White House, not “Congress” (as if there was anyone who could speak for “Congress” anyway.)
And Congress passed infrastructure bills in 2009, 2012, and 2015 before the one in 2021.
Government borrowing will be inflationary if it is financed by the central bank and it doesn't look like there is any credible plan for paying it off. That sort of thing is indistinguishable from printing currency to pay your bills, which doesn't work out very well after a while. Germany in the 1920s and Zimbabwe more recently are good examples of that.
Is the government responsible for the inflation observed right now? That's a complex answer, of which current political adversaries of the executive branch leadership would love to pin solely on them.
This may be hard to hear, but you probably shouldn't be watching it every single day. They're never going to say what you want them to say because it's not true.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine (and associated war crimes) is most definitely a root cause for current inflation spikes in food and energy. If you're looking for someone to say that it's due to other factors then you're looking for something that isn't true.
And food/energy prices are most likely going to get worse as the conflict drags on.