A top economic adviser to President Barack Obama told Newsmax on Wednesday afternoon the latest inflation number "was a doozy" and largely due to factors other than Russia's unprovoked attack on Ukraine.
President Joe Biden and his team are trying to paint the country's economic pain as "Putin's inflation," blaming Russian President Vladimir Putin for consumer prices soaring 8.5% year over year — its fastest pace of escalation in more than 40 years.
Appearing on "Eric Bolling: The Balance," University of Chicago economic professor Austan Goolsbee admitted most prices were rising before the Russia-Ukraine war.
"The inflation number was definitely a doozy," Goolsbee told Bolling. "I think the president's correct on the oil and gasoline part. On the rest of it, I think you're right. That was an overstatement.
"Prices were going up a fair bit before Putin began even amassing the troops."
Bolling and Goolsbee disagreed on when oil prices began to rise. The show host, a former Wall Street commodities trader, pointed to Election Night 2020 when oil traders "realized that Biden was going to bring in the liberal leftist progressive policies of the green energies."
Goolsbee, who served on the three-member Council of Economic Advisers under Obama, blamed Putin.
"The price of oil did skyrocket quite substantially on Dec. 13 of last year when the report came out that Putin was amassing troops on the border of Ukraine," Goolsbee said. "And it has remained high since then."
Goolsbee also defended the Biden administration’s previous spin of saying inflation was "transitory."
"It all depends over what time period," Goolsbee told Bolling. "I think it is transitory in the sense that I think this number we got here is likely to be the peak inflation and we’re coming down.
"If you look at the new numbers … inflation looks over a year, so you drop out one month and add one new month. If you look at the new months, the inflation was down, so hopefully that will continue."
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