Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, starting in 2021, led the central bank and its monetary policy on an erratic path. The economy was booming in 2021 and Powell kept short-term interest rates near zero and injected $120 billion per month via quantitative easing on top of an already soaring economy.

In 2021 Powell said: “I’m not even thinking about shrinking the Fed’s balance sheet” or “I’m not even thinking about raising interest rates.” In the Q&A portion of his February 10, 2021 speech to the Economic Club of New York he managed to work in that phrasing a couple times.

Powell and others at the Federal Reserve kept talking about inflation as “transitory” in 2021. That was the exact opposite of what they should have been saying.