Summers: ‘There’s Going to Be an Element’ of ‘Stagflation’

On Tuesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “Don Lemon Tonight,” Harvard Professor, economist, Director of the National Economic Council under President Barack Obama, and Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton Larry Summers said he’d be shocked if we still didn’t have meaningful inflation in a year and predicted that “we’re still going to have inflation for quite some time to come. And we’re probably going to have a slowing economy as well, so there’s going to be an element of what people call stagflation in our situation.”

Summers stated, “I’d be very surprised if we didn’t still have inflation at a meaningful rate a year from now. It may well come down. I think it’s probably likely to come down from the 8%-plus range that it’s been at, but we’re still going to have inflation for quite some time to come. And we’re probably going to have a slowing economy as well, so there’s going to be an element of what people call stagflation in our situation.”

He continued, “But, look, Don, what we need to do as a country is not shed tears over where we are. We need to roll up our sleeves and address the problems, and that means doing things to control demand, to make life more affordable for families by reducing pharmaceutical prices, by doing everything we can to increase energy supplies, by doing what we can with respect to maintaining a flow of goods into the country by getting rid of nonstrategic tariffs so we can bring down prices, and we need to be patient and we need to look beyond the near-term economic distress to build the greatest economy that there’s ever been by strengthening our infrastructure, by taking account of the remarkable technological progress that there has been.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett