On Wednesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Steve Rattner, who served as counselor to the Treasury Secretary in the Obama administration, said that “there’s a fair amount of fairness” to the White House being held responsible for high prices. Because inflation “was, to a considerable degree, self-inflicted, both by our fiscal policy, the stimulus, as well as by the Federal Reserve.”
Rattner stated, “Look, we’re all paying the price for having overstimulated this economy during the pandemic and putting too much money into people’s pockets, which created a lot of this inflation. And there’s no free lunch here. Now, they’re going to have to — we’re all going to have to pay the price in terms of working through this. It’s possible to work through it. It’s even theoretically possible — although maybe not the most likely scenario — to work through it without a recession, but we’re all going to have to work through it together.”
Co-host Willie Geist then stated, “Fairly or unfairly, this falls on whoever’s in the White House. Gas prices, people see them every day when they drive past a gas station. Is there anything unilaterally or otherwise that this president can do about gas prices? We know they’re consumed by this, we know they’re frustrated by it, we know that the White House knows it will be held responsible for what’s happening at gas stations. What could the president be doing differently right now?”
Rattner responded, “Really not much. … And what you said at the beginning, fairly or unfairly, there’s a fair amount of fairness here. This problem was, to a considerable degree, self-inflicted, both by our fiscal policy, the stimulus, as well as by the Federal Reserve.”
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