Fmr. Obama Treasury Counselor Rattner: Gas Won’t Hit $3.50 ‘Any Time Soon’ — Inflation Won’t Be Near Target Even in ‘Medium-Term Future’

On Tuesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Steve Rattner, who served as counselor to the Treasury Secretary in the Obama administration, stated that while there will be some relief on gas prices, “it’s not going back to $3 or $3.50 any time soon.” And inflation will not get “down to anything like 2%, which is the Fed’s adamant goal, any time in the immediate or medium-term future, for that matter.”

Rattner stated, “Look, we are in the strangest economy of my lifetime…we’ve never had a pandemic, a shutdown, a reopening like this, all of the government stimulus that went on, everything the Fed did, all at the same time. And so, yes, the economy is behaving, to use a technical term, weirdly. … In terms of the outlook, it’s — look, it’s hard to say. Oil prices — crude oil prices, which is obviously the most important ingredient in gasoline, seem to have stabilized, even gone up a little bit since they started — from their low point when they started dropping. And so, yes, we’ll get some relief at the gas station, but it’s not going back to $3 or $3.50 any time soon. And you do have other prices that are continuing to rise. Prices for housing, prices for certain kinds of food, prices for manufactured goods that people are still buying are rising. And so, inflation is going, I think, to peak somewhere along here, but we’re obviously over 9%. The question is, how far and how fast does it drop? And I don’t see it dropping down to anything like 2%, which is the Fed’s adamant goal, any time in the immediate or medium-term future, for that matter.”

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