accounts and savings accounts as a result of that. those stock markets may have been well overvalued, and we may have all been foolish for continuing to believe it could carry on ad infinitum, but the reality is people are feeling poorer. they re going to start to feel more uncertain. it won t last forever, but there are some very difficult months ahead, as americans get used to the idea of higher interest rates to bring down very high inflation. all right, richard quest, thanks so much. let s turn now to cnn s economics commentator, catherine rampell. ahead of the president s meeting with the fed chair, biden came out with an up ed in the journal that said, among other things, the federal reserve has a primary responsibility to control inflation. my predecessor demeaned the fed and past president have sought to influence decisions and appropriately during periods of elevated inflation. i won t do this, end quote. let me ask you, what can biden do that he has not already done?
continue to surge. and as cnn s m.j. lee reports, this is part of a month-long effort to convince the public the biden administration is working hard to address higher prices, even if most americans feel otherwise. my top priority, and that is addressing theflation. president biden once again trying to pivot to the american people s economic concerns. my plan is to address inflation, starts with a simple proposition. respect the fed. respect the fed s independence. which i have done and will continue to do. biden hosting federal reserve chairman jerome powell in the oval office, as elevated prices across the country including at grocery stores and at the gas pump, continue to frustrate american consumers. in a new wall street journal op-ed, the president acknowledging that many americans understandably feel anxious. but also trying to offer reassurance, writing that with the right policies, the u.s. can
so this was a widely made error a year ago. as the year wore on, i mean, i made it, too, by the way. i did not expect inflation to get as bad as it did. as the year wore on, however, it became harder to deny that inflation was not going to be transitory, that the supply chain issues were taking much longer to unwind than anybody thought. that the juicing of demand, both by the american rescue plan as well as expansionary fed policy, monetary policy, those things were combining to have much longer, more lasting inflation than expected. and then of course, we got hit with a bunch of really unlucky shocks in the last several months. this is not only about choices made last year. you also have the war in ukraine. you have the lockdowns in china related to covid. you have an avian flu, a drought in california, a bunch of things that besides the joe political consequences have also disrupted commodity markets among other things and have made inflation
i am delighted to see the president emphasize the political independence of the fed, first off. i want to praise him for that. very important to do. he s right that his predecessor did the opposite. there are limited tools that the president of the united states has available to deal with prices. the president doesn t control macro economic trends, doesn t control inflation, but there are some things he could do, things like liberalizing trade. right? trump imposed a ton of tariffs. you could they were condemned widely by democrats at the time. biden could unilaterally repeal some of those. it would have a modest one-time effect on prices. for example, the immigration system was also sabotaged by trump. further complicated and backed up by the pandemic. that s contributing to the labor shortages we see today, which are in turn feeding into inflation. the administration has been really slow in working to repair some of those problems, which again, they weren t caused by him, but the
the question what is the biggest problem facing america, the second response was inflation after bad leadership. our panel joins us now. these are some bad omens for the incumbent party. let me start with your take on president biden s wall street journal article titled my plan for fighting inflation. partly, the job market is the strongest since the post-world war ii era with 8.2 million new jobs, the fastest decline in unemployment on records. the u.s. is in bettal economic position than almost any other country. i mean, the numbers are accurate. but that s not what the american people think. it s always fraught. a lot of presidents have tried to do this, explain to the american people don t believe your lying eyes. shut up and like it. sort of the approach. and i think it s particularly fraught for the biden white house in part because inflation is so out of their control, it s just a difficult thing for any president to handle.