Inflation Soared 8.5% In March, Another Highest-in-40-Years Record

And that's just the first scoop of terrible news.

The second scoop of terrible news is that analysts increasingly fear a major recession to go along with the sky-high prices.

Prices rose 8.5 percent in March compared with a year ago, the largest annual increase in four decades, as Russia's war in Ukraine drove up energy prices even higher and policymakers launched a major effort to get soaring inflation under control.

This is from Jeff Bezos' comically corrupt corporate newsletter, so.

Watch in the next paragraph as liberal hopes transform into projections:

The inflation data, released Tuesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, showed prices rose 1.2 percent in March compared with February. Just a few months ago, officials at the White House and Federal Reserve hoped that inflation was starting to tick down month by month. But those projections were quickly dashed by Russia's invasion, covid shutdowns at major Chinese manufacturing hubs, and the bleak reality that inflation continues to spread through every crevice of the economy.

A projection is an economic prognosis. It's more than a hope. But the Washington Post sees no difference between what the left hopes will happen and what disinterested analysts actually project will happen.

The left has decided that Wishcasting -- not forecasting, but wishcasting, using your wishes and dreams to "predict" the future -- is real.

"One cannot escape it, even if one wanted to," said Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM. "This is going to continue for a while."

What I see you saying is "This is completely transitory."

Persistently high inflation comes as economists and analysts increasingly fear a looming economic slowdown. In March, Bank of America analysts lowered their estimates for growth in 2022 from 3.6 percent to 3.3 percent. The Federal Reserve also recently downgraded its GDP forecasts, with officials cautioning that the war in Ukraine is casting much uncertainty over the world order.

Note that they keep crediting this as real "growth" when it is really the economy returning to its previous baseline after having been artificially dampened by lockdown measures.

And now even this "growth" is going to slow.

And the Fed will have to continue raising interest rates to reduce inflation, while hoping that their interventions do not provoke a serious recession.

...

"The expectation going into this year was that we would basically see inflation peaking in the first quarter, then maybe leveling out," Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell said in March. "That story has already fallen apart. To the extent that it continues to fall apart, my colleagues and I may well reach the conclusion that we'll need to move more quickly."

A lot of stories have fallen apart, Jerry.

Thanks, NeverTrump! What fresh new horror have you planned for us next?

At Twitchy: All of the propaganda organizations are taking dictation from the White House -- the inflation is completely due to the Ukraine war, despite it actually being somewhat lower than the inflation we saw in December, January, and February before the war.

I guess I'm giving up on the full boycott of Salem. I'll just do a partial boycott.

posted by Ace at 03:10 PM

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