How Inflation Fooled Almost Everybody

The Fed’s move will be a coda to the pandemic era of policymaking, but it won’t end the debate about how inflation turned into such a problem to begin with, or, despite what Trump and the rest of the G.O.P. would have you believe, why it has receded. Some commentators are giving credit to the Fed, and central banks in other countries, for taking such forceful action—all those rate hikes—to anchor inflation expectations. But that may be merely a rationalization. “The reality, of course, is that the central bankers got lucky and are now taking credit for developments that were either beyond their control, or would have happened anyway,” Dario Perkins, an economist at TS Lombard, an international financial research firm, wrote earlier this summer.