Bridget Bodner

Martha, it's Bridget.

Hey, what up, B?

I don't have time to explain, but I'm at the Federal Reserve.

And you snuck into the room with the big levers and started pulling them?

Yeah, how'd you know?

Oh, typical Bridget hijinks.

So what's the situation?

Give me the facts.

Okay, so I pulled the wrong lever to give everyone more money and everything went bananas.

What did we do wrong?

If we gave money to all the families so that everybody got more money, then everybody having more money would be able to go out and buy more things.

And that would increase what we call the demand for all these things.

And that would just push the prices up higher.

Okay, thanks.

I'm going to put you on hold.

Okay, so this was apparently the wrong lever.

When we gave everyone money, it just meant everyone was able to pay those higher prices, and the prices just went even higher.

So we just made inflation worse.

Okay, let me ask Martha before you, like, pull something and then...

If when those three months are over, everybody has been earning money over those three months, and so they have a lot of money saved up, and then they go back out and they go shopping, then all of a sudden there's this big surge in demand, and it pushes prices up.