President Joe Biden's top officials and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell were quick to dismiss the first embers of inflation in the spring of 2021 in a single word: Transitory.
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More than a year later, price increases at 40-year peaks have proven to be anything but, so much so that the Fed this week appears ready to hike interest rates by the most since 1994 to quell them. Biden, meanwhile, is paying the political price for being the face Americans blame for US$5 a gallon gas and 10 per cent price increases for eggs.
In truth, the culprits contributing to the current US inflation are numerous. Fiscal spending likely went a step too far; a red-hot job market lifted worker pay the most in a generation; global supply shocks kept coming instead of easing; the war in Ukraine created food and fuel scarcities.
But both the Fed and Biden administration were slow to shift their focus from fighting the economic shock of the pandemic, particularly on employment, to controlling inflation that is so acute the central bank is willing to court a recession to fix it.
By mid-summer 2021, the pandemic employment hole was still nearly 7 million jobs, but price increases were already running at their highest in a decade and twice the Fed's 2 per cent a year target. Biden and Powell each referred to "transitory" inflation within days of each other that July.
Biden did so in a speech marking his first six months in office and Powell in his press conference following that month's Fed policy meeting.
