US consumer prices rose last month at a rate not seen in nearly 40 years, the government reported on Friday, underscoring how inflation threatens the world’s largest economy and President Joe Biden’s public support.
The Labour Department’s consumer price index (CPI) jumped 6.8 percent compared to November of last year, its biggest gain since June 1982 as prices for gasoline, used cars, rent, food and other goods continued to climb.
While the report contained signs that the inflation wave may be reaching a crest, it nonetheless poses a political liability for the president, with the Republican opposition using it to argue against his economic policies.
Biden countered that the report did not encompass recent declines in prices of energy and used cars — two main drivers of the high inflation readings seen this year — and that supply chain issues which have driven prices higher are being resolved. “Today’s numbers reflect the pressures that economies around the world are facing as we emerge from a global pandemic — prices are rising,” Biden said in a statement. He added that “price and cost increase are slowing, although not as quickly as we’d like,” but later acknowledged inflation was “a real bump in the road.”
Top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell blamed the White House for the price spikes, saying that the data “confirm what every American family already knows: Inflation is out of control on the Democrats’ watch.” Gasoline prices rose 6.1 percent last month, while prices of used cars climbed 2.5 percent, according to the CPI report.
However, those were both the same increases as in October. The month-on-month rate of consumer price inflation also decelerated slightly to 0.8 percent, but that was nonetheless higher than expected.
Biden made fighting inflation a top priority last month after the CPI in October saw its sharpest annual increase since 1990.
That surprised analysts and gave Republicans ammunition to use against Biden’s landmark Build Back Better plan, which would spend $1.8 trillion on improving social services and fighting climate change but faces a tough road in Congress, which his Democrats control by a narrow margin.
A variety of factors have caused the price increases, including shortages of components and workers, high demand for goods and rebounds in industries that were disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic but are now recovering with the help of vaccines. The degree to which Biden deserves blame for the inflation spike is the subject of debate.
Mickey Levy, chief economist covering the Americas and Asia at Berenberg Capital Markets, pointed to the supply bottlenecks, the Federal Reserve’s low interest rate policies and pandemic recovery legislation enacted under Biden and his Republican predecessor Donald Trump.
“The Biden administration fears the negative political fallout of the impact of higher inflation on households and is trying to defer the blame on special factors,” Levy said. The White House has argued that its actions helped get the country back on its feet after last year’s economic collapse, citing steady declines in the unemployment rate and the number of people filing for jobless assistance.
Some of the high inflation readings have stemmed from price increases for commodities like oil, which went negative last year at the nadir of the downturn but have risen as worldwide demand recovered in 2021.
That has pushed gas prices higher in the United States, but they have started to dial back in recent weeks.
Inflation has taken its toll on much of the world recently, but the United States has stood out as one of the most affected in the last few months.
With a 6.2 percent annual inflation rate in October, the US is now seeing prices increase at the highest rate in more than 30 years.
According to a study by Pew Research Center, in the third quarter of 2021, the country had the eighth-highest annual inflation rate among 46 countries that were examined. The US also had the third-highest increase in inflation, 3.58 percentage points, between the third quarter of 2019 and the same period this year. It trailed only Brazil and Turkey, both of which have less-developed economies that generally struggle with higher inflation rates more than the US.
