If you think about it, there have been poorly thought out inflationary policies for a long time. Between bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden, theyve increased the money supply massively and also massively increased the federal debt that was only 4 trillion around 1999. Anyone who is alive and uses money knows that things have gotten massively more expensive, but the calculation for consumer prices has been fiddled with enough to make the claim that inflation has barely broken 2%. It’s marking your own homework at that point, but they could find enough half marks to pass. The result of all this monetary policy for 20 years it’s been two make the economy and the aggregate look better by creating some of the richest people in the history of the world. Elon Musk wouldn’t be the richest man on earth in a sane world – his car company isn’t that good and people are finally starting to realize that, but people bought it because it went up, and it went up because people bought it, and all the extra money sloshing around helped.

Covid lockdowns did 3 things:

1. Shut down a lot of productive capacity by fiat. Inflation is often a self-limiting process because higher prices cause companies to spin up new productive capacity, but where the capacity is not allowed due to government, prices can go up an unlimited amount.

2. Hand out money to everyone. People who get money often spend it, leading to that product being accounted for. The rich invest, driving up assets, but the poor consume, driving up goods prices.

3. They funded the money that they gave to everyone with monetized debt. QE works by the central bank going to banks and buying their government debt from them for printed money. It replaces bonds on A bank’s balance sheet with cash, which can then be used to buy more bonds (because the banks need a certain amount of debt which is an asset for them since they lend the money). This means that of the trillions of dollars spent, many of them are effectively new dollars that were magiced into existence by the central bank. Compared to typical bond buying where somebody with money has to spend that money to lend the money to the government, meaning that the net amount of money in the system hasn’t really changed, here the money just comes to exist.

So while the inflationary policies before covid didn’t help, and I definitely would agree they helped set up a pile of wood to burn, and policies after covid haven’t helped, trying to make people’s lives more expensive when they need the opposite, it was the policies during covid that led to the inflation we are in right now.