> More importantly than this, we need to discuss why major news outlets were parroting government propaganda that shortages and inflation were transitory, when

> More importantly than this, we need to discuss why major news outlets were parroting government propaganda that shortages and inflation were transitory, when they were obviously not. Because the inflation being referred to being transitory was from the central bank's monetary policy, but the inflation we're seeing for many things is from supply-side constraints. The why of a thing happening can be just as important, if not more so, than the what happened. People were expecting demand-pull inflation ("too much" economic activity), but we we're probably seeing is the cost-push variety: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation#Keynesian_view https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation#Keynesian_view See for example Shipping being >4 times higher than the base line of January 2019: * https://www.oecd.org/economic-outlook#GDP-growth-projections-2021-2022- https://www.oecd.org/economic-outlook#GDP-growth-projections... The same thing can have multiple causes, some of which many be more easily predicted and/or modelled. Also, this begs the question for what is considered "transitory": 3 months? 6? 12? Other? The fact of the matter was that inflation was expected because of the spending surge, but that 'transitory' meant that it would be 12-18 months, some using the spending of the Korean War (as compared to the Vietnam War spending): > The Korean War started when North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950 and ended with an armistice in mid-1953. As displayed in the following figure, US inflation soared in late 1950 but returned to around 2 percent in 1952 and 1 percent in 1953.[3] * https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economic-issues-watch/inflation-fears-and-biden-stimulus-look-korean-war-not-vietnam https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economic-issues-watch/in... * https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/07/opinion/covid-biden-economy-stimulus.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/07/opinion/covid-biden-econo...