The Origins of Inflation

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For the last year, we were saying that inflation is about 5% nominal inflation. Some of these years were significantly higher than that. What caused that? Is that just the weirdness of a pandemic and coming out of aPandemic? Therefore, it's a temporary thing or other more fundamental factors that have driven inflation up. There are two broad views on that question: One is what I'd call the series of unfortunate accidents model; the other is the original sin model.

Jason Furman is a professor of economics in the Economics Department at Harvard and at the Harvard Kennedy School. He also served as the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Jason Furman discuss the causes of today’s persistent inflation in the US and whether it is likely to continue; how concerned we should be about the recent failures of mid-sized regional banks; and why America’s share of world GDP has remained resilient over the past decades even though it sometimes feels dysfunctional relative to other developed economies like Germany and Japan.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

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