Summers: Biden’s ‘Wrong’ to Blame Inflation on War, Accelerated Inflation in February Was Expected Before the War

During an interview aired on Friday’s broadcast of Bloomberg’s “Wall Street Week,” economist, Harvard Professor, Director of the National Economic Council under President Barack Obama, and Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton Larry Summers dismissed President Joe Biden’s attempt to blame February’s inflation numbers on the Russian invasion of Ukraine by stating that before the invasion, everyone expected “that inflation was going to accelerate from January to February.”

Summers said, “Look, these numbers were not a surprise, and by the way, while inflation was 7.9% over the last year, if you annualize the monthly figure, it was close to 10%. So, we’re not seeing deceleration yet, and given what’s happened in commodity markets, I don’t think we’re going to see deceleration for several months. This is a grave problem. The president was wrong to blame this month’s number on Ukraine. Everybody had been expecting, from the time before Putin launched the invasion, that inflation was going to accelerate from January to February. This is a consequence, fundamentally, of an overheated economy, and we are not going to have a full solution until we do something about that overheated economy. That’s just the fact of the situation.”

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