Let me see if I can describe the current inflation situation. We had economic disarray resulting from the pandemic which included sudden spikes and drops in supply or demand in places no one predicted and also spikes in government fiscal stimulus coupled with the existing and massively distorting of asset prices monetary stimulus. And then the Russian Ukrainian war added food and energy supply issues to the whole mess. In addition to this we discovered that the supply chain in our globalized economy is very fragile. This is surprising but shouldn’t have been. When you run the system for maximizing efficiency as measured by profit then the system is going to concentrate the producers and eliminate everyone who is slightly less efficient than their competitors and this seems to be especially true with sophisticated products. Carrots are simple and can be grown anywhere but complicated computer chips get specialized until there are only a handful of factories producing chips for each specific application. This is a fragile system and it doesn’t take much disruption for it to break down. So the supply chain issues are caused by and add to the economic disarray arising originally from the pandemic. The fiscal stimulus and also the waning of the pandemic brought surges in demand into contact with supply disruptions and that created inflation of prices as people compete for scare products. The Fed’s solution to this is to raise interest rates and this seems to be having the opposite effect of lowering interest rates, asset prices are coming down, first in the stock market and more slowly in the housing market, but the other inflation people are feeling, the increase in energy prices and the prices of products, will raising interst rates really bring these prices down? I guess it will eventually, but it seems as though they will really have to punish the economy to destroy enough demand to lower the prices of products which are inflating because there is too little supply. Seems like monetary policy is the wrong tool. Oh well.