Fmr. Obama Treasury Counselor Rattner: ‘It’s Time to Start Dealing with the Deficit’ to Fight Inflation

On Wednesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” MSNBC Economic Analyst Steve Rattner, who served as counselor to the Treasury Secretary in the Obama administration, said we need to “start dealing with the deficit as part of trying to bring down the pressure on inflation.”

Rattner said, “I think it’s a combination of issues…obviously. I think you certainly have to put the Fed near the top of the list for putting…$6 trillion literally into the economy in the form of low interest rates and buying bonds and things like that. You do have to fault, a bit, the Biden administration and the size of the rescue packages that they tried to get passed, put aside the ones that got passed. There’s something over $2 trillion in consumer bank accounts that they haven’t been able to spend due to the pandemic that is now coming out, and that’s a lot of what’s driving this. And obviously, there’s bad luck. … Ukraine certainly plays a role in all this. So, there [are] a number of places to put the blame. But what Manchin is trying to do is basically preempt another big rescue package and make clear that he thinks the next rescue package needs to have a big component of deficit reduction in it. And I would agree with that. It’s time to start dealing with the deficit as part of trying to bring down the pressure on inflation.”

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