Hoyer: Inflation ‘a Worldwide Phenomena’ Caused by COVID, Putin’s War

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) said Friday on CNN’s “At This Hour” that inflation is a worldwide phenomenon caused by the coronavirus pandemic and the war in Ukraine.

Hoyer said, “Gas prices have come down approximately 20 percent over the last 40 days. That’s good news. Let’s hope it continues because inflation is a real problem. There’s no doubt about that. We ought to focus on the fact that this is a worldwide phenomenon caused by the pandemic and caused by the war in Ukraine that Putin started and is pursuing. So that the United States is about in the middle in terms of how much inflation we have of the developed countries in the world. So it’s a worldwide phenomenon.”

He added, “Do we need to get a handle on it, are people having trouble at the grocery store and the gas pump? They are. We passed a bill on gouging that our Republican friends did not support. We passed a bill on infrastructure. We passed a bill on fuel and food to try to bring food prices and fuel prices down and protect supply chains. So we’ve taken a lot of actions to try to address this. It’s a real problem. The federal reserve, of course, again, acted yesterday, and what the trick is is to bring prices down without creating a recession. Of course, there’s definition of recession goes back and forth. But we have 3.6% unemployment. That’s a very low unemployment. It was 10.8% unemployment in the second year of the Reagan administration, and we have 8.7 million new jobs over the last 15 months.”

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