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As Americans have continued to sound off over sticker shock on retail and grocery shelves, the U.S. Treasury secretary admitted Wednesday that her public predictions were wrong. "I regret saying it was transitory [inflation]. It has come down, but I think transitory means a few weeks or months to most people. And it's lasted longer than that," Janet Yellen told FOX Business’ Edward Lawrence in an exclusive interview. In early June 2021, Yellen had tamped down inflationary concerns, claiming rising costs and the contributing factors were "transitory," a term used to describe temporary market conditions. "We have in recent months...

WASHINGTON — Federal bank regulators are prepared to do whatever is needed to “ensure that depositors’ savings remain safe” in U.S. banks, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told members of the Senate Appropriations Committee on Wednesday. Yellen is likely to face tough questions from senators about the federal response to two bank failures earlier this month: California-based Silicon Valley Bank on March 10 and New York-based Signature bank just two days later. In the hours after the banks collapsed, she and top Treasury officials determined the situation posed a danger to “the broader banking system and the American economy” and required...

The Federal Reserve on Wednesday enacted a quarter percentage point interest rate increase, expressing caution about the recent banking crisis and indicating that hikes are nearing an end. Along with its ninth hike since March 2022, the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee noted that future increases are not assured and will depend largely on incoming data. “The Committee will closely monitor incoming information and assess the implications for monetary policy,” the FOMC’s post-meeting statement said. “The Committee anticipates that some additional policy firming may be appropriate in order to attain a stance of monetary policy that is sufficiently restrictive to...

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Tuesday the government is ready to provide further guarantees of deposits if the banking crisis worsens. In remarks prepared for a speech to the American Bankers Association, the former Federal Reserve chair said authorities believe they have taken appropriate actions to stem liquidity problems in the sector, but will do more if needed. “The steps we took were not focused on aiding specific banks or classes of banks. Our intervention was necessary to protect the broader U.S. banking system,” Yellen said. “And similar actions could be warranted if smaller institutions suffer deposit runs that pose...

American oil company Chevron nearly doubled profits from 2021 to 2022, posting record-breaking annual earnings of $35.5 billion, the company announced Friday. The company’s 2022 profit was roughly one-third greater than its previous record, set in 2011, and came off the back of high gas prices, The Wall Street Journal reported. The company reported an annual revenue of $246.3 billion, up from $162.5 billion in 2021, and a fourth quarter profit of $6.4 billion, with revenue at $55 billion. “Again in 2022, we delivered on our financial priorities: returning cash to shareholders, investing capital efficiently, and paying down debt,” CEO...

During a portion of an interview with NBC News released on Monday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said she’s confident that “inflation will come down over the next year or two,” but while there are “good indications” that inflation will decline, she isn’t certain that inflation has peaked and doesn’t want to predict inflation numbers on a month-by-month basis. Yellen stated, “I have confidence that inflation will come down over the next year or two, so I believe that what [the Federal Reserve is] doing will work.”

TORONTO (AP) — Canada’s central bank said Wednesday it is raising its target interest rate by a full percentage point in an effort to fight inflation — and warned more rate hikes are likely to follow. The Bank of Canada raised the overnight rate to 2.5% in the biggest increase since 1998 and the highest level since 2008. The bank said inflation is higher and more persistent than had been projected and the bank expects it will likely remain around 8% in the next few months. It blamed the war in Ukraine, ongoing supply disruptions and excess demand in Canada....

Ford Motor Co.’s hot-selling Mustang Mach-E electric SUV and other plug-in models are being rendered unprofitable by rising raw material costs. “We actually had a positive bottom line profit when we launched the Mach-E, commodity costs have wiped that out,” Chief Financial Officer John Lawler said Wednesday at the Deutsche Bank Global Automotive Conference, referring to 2020, when the vehicle went on sale. “You’re going to see pressure on the bottom line when we launch our EVs, they’re not going to be positive.”

Inflation wasn’t transitory. And inflation hasn’t peaked. It’s more like peak inflation was transitory.The May Consumer Price Index (CPI) came in higher than expected. The headline year-on-year price increase was 8.6%. The projection was for the CPI to hold steady at the same level as last month — 8.3%. Instead, we got the biggest jump in prices during this inflationary cycle and the highest CPI print since 1981. On a month-to-month basis, the CPI rose by 1%. This was above the 0.7% projection. Another spike in fuel and energy costs primarily drove the monthly increase. Energy costs rose 3.9% during...

President Joe Biden suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin was a “dictator” guilty of “genocide” in a speech on Tuesday. “Your family budget, your ability to fill up your tank, none of it should hinge on whether a dictator declares war and commits genocide a half a world away,” Biden said during a speech in Iowa on Tuesday. This is the first time that Biden has suggested that Putin is committing “genocide,” a term the administration has steered clear from as they continue to condemn Russia’s escalation of the war in Ukraine

President Joe Biden promised during his campaign that he would allow “no more drilling on federal lands. No more drilling, including offshore. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period, ends, number one.” And since taking office, his administration has implemented policies, oftentimes under the radar, that have made life more difficult for the domestic oil and gas industry and led to increased foreign — including Russian — imports. In many ways, he’s been following in the footsteps of blue-state Democrats, whose policies began undermining domestic energy production long before Russian president Vladimir Putin decided to invade...

On inflation: 'How long do you guys think temporary is?' Fox News White House Correspondent Peter Doocy cornered Press Secretary Jen Psaki on both her claims that inflation was likely to be temporary and the Biden administration’s repeated insistence that the rising cost of gas could be tied solely to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Doocy pointed to Psaki’s claim, made a short time earlier in Thursday’s White House press briefing, that economists were predicting that inflation would begin to resolve by the end of the year — and he noted that the Biden administration had been claiming that inflation would...

An elitist economist is insulting his readers by doubling down on the much-criticized notion that spiking inflation is only “transitory.” Princeton University professor Alan Blinder penned an absurd Wall Street Journal op-ed headlined, “When It Comes to Inflation, I’m Still on Team Transitory.” Blinder even conceded in his subheadline that “transitory” apologist Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell “may have retired the term," but proceeded to claim that "bottlenecks and shortages should be over soon.” This was the same Blinder who wrote an equally absurd March 15 op-ed headlined: “There’s No Need to Panic About a Little Inflation.” Another Blinder piece...

Remember when clueless macrotourists and worthless econo-hacks who have zero understanding of actual economic dynamics spent miles of digital ink convincing their tiny echochambers that they were right and that inflation was transitory (or rather, desperately scrambled to mask their utter lack of grasp of even the simplest concepts): Team transitory won btw. pic.twitter.com/7CEwdC11h7 — George Pearkes (@pearkes) October 13, 2021 Three month core inflation. Why isn’t everyone calling this a win for team transitory? pic.twitter.com/KB9EawJLo1 — Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) October 13, 2021 Not out of the supply chain woods but score one for team transitory–used car hyperinflation is behind...

U.S. employers reported significant increases in prices and wages even as economic growth decelerated to a “modest to moderate” pace in September and early October, the Federal Reserve said on Wednesday in its latest compendium of reports about the economy. “Outlooks for near-term economic activity remained positive, overall, but some Districts noted increased uncertainty and more cautious optimism than in previous months,” according to the summary of information from the Fed’s 12 regional districts, prepared as part of a broad range of briefings ahead of policymakers’ Nov. 2–3 meeting. Employment increased, though labor growth was dampened by a low supply...

Tonight, the Fed is still partying with your currency like this is the richest country in the worldThere's probably no institution in American life that has more effect on how you live, but that we talk about less than the Federal Reserve. People don't care to talk about the Federal Reserve because it seems very complex and a lot of what it does is in fact complex. Unless you have a grounding in monetary policy, it's hard to know exactly what's going on. But the basics aren't that complicated, actually, and here are a few of them. The Federal Reserve...

Atlanta Fed president Raphael Bostic finally broke away from the fake narrative bandwagon created by his Fed peers, the complicit media and Wall Street sycophants, when during a virtual speech at the Peterson Institute of International Economics, he said that price surges caused by supply-chain disruptions or the reopening of the services sector are likely to last, i.e., they are not transitory, and seem to be broadening to more parts of the economy, i.e., getting worse. Or precisely what we have been saying since May. “It is becoming increasingly clear that the feature of this episode that has animated price...

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Tuesday advised that inflation could hit the United States for a while before eventually letting up. Yellen told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that inflationary pressures are “transitory” at this time but cautioned “that doesn’t mean they’ll go away over the next several months.” She added that she trusts the fed “to make the right decisions.”

Some of the biggest names in business virtually attended the annual Morgan Stanley Laguna conference last week and warned about the complex nature of soaring inflation. Much of the discussion was centered around the soaring cost of raw materials, labor, and logistical nightmares. Corporate leaders from 3M Company to Trane Technologies to General Electric Co., among others, all warned about increasing inflationary pressures, according to Bloomberg. 3M’s Chief CFO Monish Patolawala shocked attendees by calling inflation “unprecedented.” He said the impact of higher commodity prices and soaring freight prices would impact its 2021 earnings. Trane Technologies Plc’s CFO Chris Kuehn...

In the past month, a feud has broken out between the so-called “team transitory”, comprising mostly of pro-Fed, pro-Biden commentators, who urge the public to ignore the “transitory” hyperinflation that by now is painfully obvious to everyone (see today’s UMich report for the gruesome details), and not to blame either the Fed or the administration for the collapse in the dollar’s purchasing power. Then there are the realists who see a much more ominous trend in deglobalization – you know, the same trend that allowed inflation to decline along with interest rates since the early 1980s – and warn that...