The US government is now blaming average Americans for inflation. Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen says Americans “splurging” their money on products is the real cause of inflation, not corporate greed and price gouging.

Yellen made an appearance on a talk show, ‘The Late Show with Stephen Colbert’ and enlightened the audience on why she thinks inflation has gotten so high.

Yellen says, “We had a rapid recovery from the pandemic. When President Biden was elected, unemployment was quite high, it was close to 7%, and we put policies in place that generated a very rapid recovery. Unemployment quickly fell back into the 3s.” Yellen clarifies that unemployment is now 3.7%. “Normally you wouldn’t expect, um, just because you had a rapid recovery, for inflation to rise very much if at all. But it turned out the pandemic had very special impacts on the economy. Remember, everybody stopped spending on services, they were in their homes for a year or more. Um, they wanted to buy grills and office furniture, they were working from home. They suddenly started splurging on goods, buying technology, um, you know we suddenly working through technology, and bottlenecks started developing where supply in particular important sectors of the economy just couldn’t keep up with demand.”

Colbert asked Yellen if she thought the US was headed for a recession, she doesn’t think so, but she thinks it is a natural reaction that the economy has slowed down after the pandemic. She says, “I think we can take the heat out of the economy, and remember Russia has conducted a brutal war against Ukraine and that caused gas prices to spike, it’s caused food prices to spike. It’s creating hardship all over the world and we’re really trying to address those- those strains as well. That’s another reason inflation went up, and we’re trying to hold that down.”

Inflation is at its highest level in more than 40 years and the Fed has continually raised interest rates this year to try to address it.

Photo by Bruno Kelzer from Unsplash