CNBC anchor Carl Quintanilla confronted Trump White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett over inflation on Tuesday, noting it has been “increasing for 5 straight months” as of September.
Due to the government shutdown, there hasn’t been a Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report measuring inflation since the September Consumer Price Index (CPI) report, which showed an increase of 3 percent over the prior year and a .3 percent increase over August.
Last week, Republicans lost big on Election Day in an electoral bloodbath that President Donald Trump chalked up to factors that included “affordability” — which he then repeatedly claimed to have already solved.
On Tuesday’s edition of CNBC’s Money Movers, Hassett was praising the “trajectory” of inflation when Quintanilla cut in to ask if he was taking the five months of increases into account — not counting October:
KEVIN HASSETT: And the trajectory is really, really, really good if you look at it. And inflation is one of those things that has a lot of momentum, if you look at the charts, and the momentum right now is headed really towards the Fed’s target.CARL QUINTANILLA: Even though– so even though it’s been increasing for five straight months as of September?KEVIN HASSETT: Well, I guess if you look at it from January, there’s ups and downs and seasonals. But yeah, it surprised on the downside. People were expecting it
to accelerate and it didn’t.And I think that that is because this growth that we’re getting is not from like printing a massive amount of government debt and sending checks to people like Joe Biden did.I mean, think about it. If you look the macroeconomic picture, the way you get inflation down is you don’t have the government spend like crazy.And we’ve actually got a deficit reduction so far this year that’s really on track by December to be down $600 billion for the year alone.And so that $600-billion reduction in the deficit takes the macroeconomic pressure off.But the other thing is we’re doing it is we’re really digging into what we could do at the micro level to go after price inflation on an item-by-item basis.And so you can remember all the work we did at the beginning of the year on eggs, egg prices are now down relative to last year, and we are looking at housing and other things that we can do to make people’s lives more affordable.
Watch above via CNBC’s Money Movers.