president welcomes all ideas to protect consumers and make sure oil companies are not taking advantage of putin s war and are competing fairly. no company should be engaging in unfair practices to hike up prices on american consumers press the president has said president putin s actions are what s driving the price increase at the pump. spring wall street journal columnist dan henninger. so mary, bad news continues economically. the gas prices the signs of slowing consumer spending on the stock markets have been just awful. what are those signals all telling us? are we headed towards stagflation or maybe recession? nothing has really changed. the fed was giving a lot of what we call monetary accommodation which is flooding basically the economy with money. and on the fiscal side president biden was spending a lot of money. there is a lot of concern that at some point that was going to cause inflation but begot the inflation the entertainment they re going to raise inte
that in large part helping ukraine they understand this war. it was not confusing. there is an isolation strain and the republican party. it has been there for a while. it is not that big. i don t see it growing at the moment there is also an element of fiscal conservatism in there. but themselves on the record for that purpose. so i don t think it is a danger to the republican party is going isolationist right now but obviously something you want to keep an eye on it. paul: kim, do you agree with that from dan? i mean certainly josh hawley in his own mind anyway the conversations he is having he thanks he imagines himself as a potential candidate. do you think there is an opening
done, not to associate my colleagues about i m going to say right now i m s just saying it myself i think there might be a need for indictment. paul: let s play a wall street journal promise kim strassel editor board member alicia. we know for a fact the abbott shutdown of the plant triggered this. but, i think a lot of people wonder is how could the shutdown of a single plant trigger such a nationwide shortage? what is behind that? usually when there is a storage of any good or there is a shutdown of a plant in the u.s. usually import from overseas. but before that we can t in parts because fda labeling and regulations that restrict competition especially from europe or there is no evidence european baby products it s less safe than u.s. products and that
the regulatory import so we can actually increase the u.s. supply. and kim, the speaker of the house saying indictments could be coming. i think she means some private actors somehow who had a role in the formula shortage or at the abbott plant or something she did not specify. i don t think she means indictment of the architects of the bad government policies. unfortunately she did not meet federal bureaucrats which are behind so much of what is going on here. it s a classic democratic ploy again i was trite to suggest is an evil plot in private business to raise prices let s not what s happening here for the most part is entirely related to fda actions and state program action will be really great if washington could figure some of this out.
it really won t do any good the issue is not in this case transportation which is snarled other supply chains. the issue is we are not able to remove the fta barriers it says are going to start to open import entry not enforce the labeling regulations are typically does. here again the barriers are regulatory. kim there is another issue here we have been writing about which is there is a program the states run the feds a fund which is the women s infant and children program. that also has various angles to it that have reduced the supply and competition among baby formula makers, tell us about that. first of all, paul bear in mind there are only four producers that hold 90% of the baby food market here in the