Cardi B for Fed Chairman

It’s nice to see the fray over inflation be joined by an economist with the stature of Belcalis Marlenis Almánzar Cephus, better known as Cardi B. She just went into a tirade after discovering that the price of lettuce has skyrocketed and that groceries cost three times what they did only recently. We don’t know why the economist focused on lettuce — though the word is slang for money. Someone, in any event, ought to put her on the board of the Federal Reserve. Heretofore, the monetary debate has been an exercise among academic and government economists, who dilate on inflation in abstract terms, oblivious to the pain that runaway prices inflict. So it’s welcome to see a popular, if uncredentialed, economist who is fluent in rap — and prepared to throw at the Federal Reserve the verbal equivalent of one of her high-heeled shoes. She brings a refreshing candor to this policy question.Witness Professor B’s framing of the matter. While economists drily note that the consumer price index in November rose by 7.1 percent, a pace not seen in some forty years, Professor B gets to the heart of the matter, asking on Twitter: “Bitch why lettuce cost 6 dollars where I live at ?” The question is followed up with an emoji known as the “Expressionless Face,” described by emojipedia as conveying “a sense of frustration or annoyance.”“When I go to the f***** supermarket,” Professor B explains in a video message quoted in the Daily Mail, “I’m seeing that everything tripled up — that like lettuce was like $2 a couple of months ago and now it’s like f****** $7.” She goes on to beseech “anybody that is responsible” to get prices down post-haste. Despite a net worth estimated by the Daily Mail at $62 million, Ms. B says she “budgets every week to avoid going broke.”Make her chairman of the Fed, we say. Never once did she pass off inflation as “transitory.” It’s hard to imagine she’d have hesitated on interest rates. We cannot recall a moment in which the current Fed chairman, Jay Powell, has offered an anti-inflation message as intelligent or articulate as Professor B’s effusion. In place of Mr. Powell’s usual posture of detachment, we, for one, would welcome a signal of “frustration or annoyance” with inflation.We’re not suggesting the chairman throw his wing tips at anyone. Yet where was Mr. Powell when the Congress, at the prodding of President Biden, hatched its scheme to stimulate an already-recovering economy with a $1.9 trillion spending bill in the Spring of 2021? The GOP certainly warned that the profligacy would cause inflation. Far from raising concerns, Mr. Powell praised the “swift and vigorous” spending effort by Congress.Our Lawrence Kudlow has already observed that economists are starting to grasp that “huge federal overspending” is a root cause of the “sky-rocketing inflation.” For further evidence that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce, look to the $1.7 trillion spendathon recently inflicted by the lame-duck Congress in its final days in an act of bipartisan budgetary recklessness. It may well pave the way for yet more inflation this year.So when Professor B asks why her lettuce — and other groceries — have tripled in price, it suggests that her grasp of the fundamental economic questions at stake here exceeds that of the solons on Capitol Hill or the PhDs at the Fed. The perspicacity of her remarks also reflects a wisdom that surpasses the Fed’s policy makers, who are targeting the job market, and not their own policy errors, in their hapless attempt to curb the inflation spiral.

Cardi B for Fed Chairman

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