The Federal Reserve Chair first declared inflation “transitory”, subsequently saying that “transitory has different meanings to different people… I think it’s probably a good time to retire that word”.

April 2021: Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell publicly promises that price increases would “disappear over the following months and they’ll be transitory. They carry no implication for the rate of inflation in later periods. So that’s base effects.”

November 2021: “Inflation has run well above 2% for long enough that if you look back a few years, inflation averages 2%. So I think the word transitory has different meanings to different people. To many, it carries a time, a sense of short lived. We tend to use it to mean that it won’t leave a permanent mark in the form of higher inflation. I think it’s probably a good time to retire that word and try to explain more clearly what we mean.”