What a joke. The same outlet that tried to paint America’s inflation situation before the 2024 election as Yankee Doodle Dandy! is doing the backstroke now that Donald Trump is president.
That's some convenient timing.
Axios chief economic correspondent Neil Irwin released a damning story Thursday headlined, “Inflation warning signs mount.”
Irwin wrote that “Bond markets are betting that inflation will stay elevated in the years ahead, and some evidence from business surveys and forecasters points in the same direction.” What this meant, argued Irwin, was that “the Trump administration and the Federal Reserve face a headwind in securing a return to low inflation — concerns that have escalated just in the last few weeks, as the president has threatened tariffs on a variety of U.S. trading partners.”
“Securing a return to low inflation?” This is the same reporter who on July 1, 2024 was celebrating to the cyberverse that President Joe Biden’s so-called “soft landing seems to have stuck.”
Later that month, Irwin was adamant that “[t]he soft landing was very much intact this spring.”
On Election Eve, Irwin propagandized that “the U.S. economy is by most measures stronger than it has been in modern election cycles” with some exceptions. “Inflation has, of course, weighed on public sentiment. But over the 12 months ended in September, the Consumer Price Index rose only 2.4%,” Irwin gaslighted at the time.
Now, Irwin’s flipped like a pancake on a griddle and made it seem like that supposed soft-landing he blathered on for months about is actually still “stuck” in mid-air, as was evidenced by the chart he plastered over his new piece:
The gap between interest rates on standard U.S. Treasury securities and inflation-protected bonds gives a window into how much bond investors expect prices to rise in the future. That gap, known as the breakeven rate, has been on a tear in recent weeks.
But we shouldn’t expect anything less from Irwin. After all, when Irwin was senior economic correspondent at the New York Times in November 2021 (when inflation was 6.8 percent), he tried to make Americans out to be ungrateful idiots for whining so much about prices going to the moon when they had so much going for them. “Americans Are Flush With Cash and Jobs. They Also Think the Economy Is Awful,” read his headline at the time.
Despite Biden enacting policies that predictably launched inflation into orbit that year, Irwin instead tried to blame the supposedly “more powerful force” of “the psychology of inflation” for turning Americans against the Biden economy.
“Americans are, by many measures, in a better financial position than they have been in many years. They also believe the economy is in terrible shape,” Irwin audaciously claimed.
Keep it up Irwin. We can see right through your nonsense.
