A nudge on interest rates from the Federal Reserve. A gradual winding down of quantitative easing. No more stimulus cheques flying out of the White House window. And rising energy prices dropping out of the annualised headline rate. This was meant to be the month when the spurt of inflation in the United States turned out – as president Joe Biden and his officials insisted it would – to be mostly transitory. We were told that it would die down over the course of this year.
For Biden and the US economy, there is now no easy way back
But, whoops, if that was the plan, it has already gone badly off the rails. Today’s inflation figure for the US was genuinely shocking. The headline rate has jumped once again, with the consumer price index hitting seven per cent, up from the 6.8 per cent recorded last month, and the steepest rate since way back in June 1982.
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