June 3, 2022: It’s not every day an official admits they’re wrong

In which, Janet Yellen finally faces the truth on inflation, global oil markets shift along with Middle East trade flows, everyone has an opinion on guns, and a country rebrands itself.

It’s not everyday an official admits they’re wrong

Last year, when it became pretty clear we were headed towards some stormy waters with inflation, government officials generally downplayed the dangers inflation posed, or that it would be a long term thing. Foremost among those officials was Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. This week, Yellen reversed course and acknowledged that she had been wrong about the danger inflation posed to the national and global economy. Her comments came as other leaders in the financial world continued sounding alarm bells over the current state of inflation.

It’s not every day that you see a senior official willing to admit they’re wrong about something as big as this, so Secretary Yellen is to be commended for that. My question to the Secretary now is, what are we going to do about this?

Global oil shifts

In addition to runaway government spending and supply shocks, the spike in energy prices has been playing a huge contributing role to inflation. Earlier this year, the Biden administration sought to induce OPEC to increase its oil production to offset energy losses from the reduction in Russian oil and gas exports. Readers will recall that OPEC demurred, the price of oil spiked, Saudi Aramco raked in profits, and we ended up with massively expensive gas here in the states.

Perhaps OPEC countries thought Europe and America weren’t serious about ending reliance on Russian oil and didn’t want to create a market glut. Perhaps they were hedging between America and Russia. Perhaps they wanted to cash in on a global energy crisis. Maybe they were doing all three.

Whatever the case, OPEC appears to have got the memo that the shift away from Russian oil is moving towards permanence in Europe and the US is preparing to subsidize its oil industry. Seeing a longer term shift occurring may have induced OPEC to finally open the spigots a little wider. Will that lower prices at the pump this summer? Unlikely in the short term, but hopefully sooner rather than later.

Guns, and what to do about them… we think

As the citizens of Uvalde began laying their dead to rest and the Buffalo shooter made his first court appearance, the debate on gun policy in the US started to pick up steam. In some senses it’s steam in the literal sense: hot air, lacking substance, which quickly dissipates.

Democrats in the House of Representatives said they’d be bringing a new assault weapon ban to the floor. It will likely pass on a party line vote before getting shut down in the Senate, but at least Congressional Democrats could then blame the failure of gun policy reform on Republicans. It’s an icky, but predictable, bit of political theater. 

While progressives called for increased amounts of gun control (even Canada is jumping into the game), conservatives renewed their calls for better school security.

Despite all the back and forth on policy, accusations of bad faith proposals, and base ignorance on guns in general, a particularly refreshing bit of analysis stood out from RAND, an article stating what should be obvious: some gun control measures work, others don’t. Shocker of shocks! You mean, there may be merit to be found in some of the arguments by both gun control advocates AND gun advocates? What a novel thought.