Catherine Rampell

Yeah, I think there's already evidence of that.

Inflation has picked up since Trump's Liberation Day in April.

Those things are not unrelated.

Inflation had been sort of like trending downward for a long time, and now it's been picking back up.

In addition to higher prices, higher price growth, you're also seeing, as we've been discussing, some job losses and some slowdown in the economy.

That's the stagnation and the inflation that, you know, come together and become a stagflation.

A beautiful word.

Exactly.

Something people don't say anymore.

Trump is actually bringing it back this time.

But he literally is because the explanation behind both of those bad things happening is tariffs, right?

Tariffs raise prices.

That's the inflation part.

And tariffs also weigh on the economy and make it harder for businesses to invest and grow.

and buy stuff.

That's the stagnation part.

So Trump, again, is single-handedly dragging down the economy and also making it much harder for the Fed to do its job.

Because the Fed is supposed to both promote stable prices and maximum employment, and tariffs make both of those

harder.

And the thing you would do if you're the Fed to address one of those problems is the opposite of the thing you would do to address the other one of those problems, specifically that if you care about inflation, you would raise interest rates.