[Reason] The White House's latest attempt to scapegoat rising prices ignores everything that happened before the past three weeks.Ten months ago, Jeremy Siegel issued a dire warning about the trajectory of prices.
"The money supply since the beginning of the pandemic, so a little over a year, has gone up almost 30 percent. Now, that money is not going to disappear. That money is going to find its way into spending and into higher prices," Siegel, a professor of finance at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, told CNBC during an interview on May 14. "Over the next two, three years we could easily have 20 percent inflation with this increase in the money supply."
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The Massachusetts Democrat instead attributed skyrocketing prices around the country to the COVID-19 pandemic and companies passing costs on to consumers.
"I think the primary cause of this bout of pricing increases starts with COVID," Warren told host Tyler Mathisen.
"And the fact that we have supply chain kinks, and that people rapidly shifted the demand curves so that demand for services went down and demand for goods went up. So those two forced prices up, that's part one."
Warren then asserted that companies are offloading costs through price gouging, citing the consolidation of major industries."What has also happened is that now that we're living in America where there's a lot more concentration in certain industries. Look at the oil industry, look at the meat industry, look at groceries generally.
''What's happened is that these companies have said, 'you know, we'll pass along costs, but while we're at it and everyone's talking about rising costs, let's just add an extra big dollop of cost increases to expand our profits,'" Warren said.
"Part one, yes, very much the pandemic. Part two, companies that recognize that because they don't face a lot of competition can goose those prices up," she added.
President Joe Biden has frequently blamed Russia for soaring prices, specifically on oil and gas. The White House did, however, flirt with rhetoric similar to Warren's earlier this month.
"We understand Putin's war against the people of Ukraine is causing prices to rise. We get that. That's self-evident. But ... it's no excuse to exercise excessive price increases or padding profits or any kind of effort to exploit this situation or American consumers," Biden said in a March 8 press briefing.
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