On Inflation, Trump Snatched Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

One of the great ironies of American politics is that Donald Trump won the 2024 election basically because a significant number of credulous voters believed his promises to bring prices down beginning on “day one.”

What actually happened was that America, along with the rest of the world, experienced a temporary surge in inflation in 2021-22, mainly because of the lingering effects of Covid disruptions. And voters still blamed Joe Biden for that surge.

But by 2024 the war against inflation had been largely won, at startlingly low cost — the recession many analysts claimed would be necessary to get inflation down never happened, but inflation came way down anyway.

And then Trump snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

There is still some controversy among economists about how much responsibility Biden administration policies bear for the 2021-22 inflation surge. My view is, very little. But there is no question who is responsible for the resurgence in inflation: this is all on Trump, first the tariffs and then then the Iran war.

And there’s a big risk that the succession of inflation shocks will do what the post-Covid shock didn’t: get entrenched in expectations, so that we will need a recession to get inflation back down.

I’m in Oxford, giving the James Martin Memorial Lecture this afternoon. So that’s all for today.