I think another factor is the rise of china, which ramped up massively in that time, hid inflation.
We thought the near 0% rates had no consequences except for housing and a few other non china influenced products. It turns out the inflation was there but china's ramp up hid it. In fact, in hindsight we saw inflation everywhere except in china's manufacturing (and perhaps an oil sands boom helped too). But china manufactured so much of what we consume we didn't notice the consequences.
Inflation everywhere? Like in car prices? Food costs? Eggs? Milk? Butter? Paper? Wood? Lumber? Orange Juice?
These things aren't made in China (or at least, the USA largely eats milk-and-eggs from USA and/or Canada), and for the 2010 through 2019 period, their prices were incredibly stable.
What American manufactured product (or agricultural product) inflated from 2010 through 2019 to a degree beyond which was reasonable?
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The main issue with the Fed, was that they made the wrong call on Inflation in 2021, thinking it was "transitory". Now that we've had a year, I can agree with the inflation doomers that the inflation was in fact sticking this time around.
However, the inflation doomers were wrong from 2010 through 2019, so you'll have to forgive me for not listening to the boys who cried wolf.
>The main issue with the Fed, was that they made the wrong call on Inflation in 2021, thinking it was "transitory".
They made the wrong prediction, but the Fed isn't in the business of making predictions. It makes sense that they didn't want to crash the economy while people were still largely intent on staying at home. The Fed's mistake was caving into Trump's pressure to reverse quantitative tightening when the economy was healthy in 2019. When an unexpected disaster inevitably struck, they little headroom to lower interest rates, so they had no choice but to ramp up quantitative easing.
We thought the near 0% rates had no consequences except for housing and a few other non china influenced products. It turns out the inflation was there but china's ramp up hid it. In fact, in hindsight we saw inflation everywhere except in china's manufacturing (and perhaps an oil sands boom helped too). But china manufactured so much of what we consume we didn't notice the consequences.