Fox Anchor Tries To Blame Biden For Bombshell Inflation Increase — Expert Won’t Agree

Fox Business Network host David Asman tried to blame a bombshell inflation report on “Bidenomics” — but his on-air expert disagreed, pegging it to other factors.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics published its CPI (Consumer Price Index) report on Wednesday morning, which showed worse-than-expected numbers that immediately sent the stock market tumbling.

On Wednesday’s edition of Fox Business Network’s Varney & Co, Asman — filling in for Stuart Varney — tossed to Lauren Simonetti to go over the “bad news” inflation numbers, which she noted did not even include “tariff impacts.”

Asman then turned to Michael Lee of Michael Lee Strategy, a frequent FBC guest analyst, and asked him “Is this the result of the last gasp of Bidenomics spending?”

Lee did not agree:

DAVID ASMAN: I’m sorry to start with some bad news, but we have to begin with this inflation report. Lauren, good morning. Take us through it.

LAUREN SIMONETTI: Hot inflation to start the year. Prices rose half a percent last month. They’re up 3% in the past year. Shelter The cost of shelter is responsible for about 30% of that overall increase in prices.

Okay. Let’s take out food and energy. Core prices, they rose 3.3% in the past year. So moving further away from that 2% goal of the Fed.

Remember, these numbers do not include tariff impacts. Where was inflation concentrated in January? Transportation up 8%. Shelter again up about 4.5%. Food prices up 2.5% and egg prices accounting for two thirds of the monthly increase in the food at home component.

Now, the expectations for the Fed rate cut have been pushed back to October.

DAVID ASMAN: Yeah. Words of Donald Trump notwithstanding. We’ll get into that with our next guest. Thank you very much.

Mike Lee joins me now. Mike, a huge rise in the CPI, CPI, Is this the result of the last gasp of Bidenomics spending?

MICHAEL LEE: Well, look, I think it has more to do with the intricacies of how the CPI is calculated.

So shelter made up a huge portion of this rise. And I just think for people at home watching this, what you want to look at is the month over month core.

We came in at 0.4. If you annualize that out, that’s about a 5% annualized rate. You want to see that at a .1 or a point two if we want rates to get low again.

But look, this shelter component has a 12 month lag and the price of shelter declined dramatically over the last 12 months. So that is going to come down a bunch.

I you know, transportation, I don’t know how it could be up 8% in a single month. But the intricacies of how they calculate this can throw people into a tizzy.

There is absolutely nothing that troubles me about this number. I think even if we got a number that was half the amount, Jerome Powell is going to play games with cutting interest rates.

I think interest rate cuts are something that we can talk about in the back half of this year. But I but when and how many I think is very much up in the air at the moment.

DAVID ASMAN: And by the way, the president did put out a truth social posting this morning. He said “Interest rates should be lowered, something which would go hand in hand with upcoming tariffs. Let’s rock and roll, America.”.

Given this inflation report, I would take that message off the table, wouldn’t you?

Watch above via Fox Business Network’s Varney & Co.