“We expect March CPI headline to be extraordinarily elevated due to Putin’s price hike.” That’s the quote from White House press secretary Jen Psaki.
CPI is the consumer price index. It’s the Labor Department’s way to measure inflation of what we pay for stuff. Apparently, we are about to find out just how much.
The CPI for March is expected to show an 8.4 percent annual increase in prices. If true, that would be the highest level since 1981.
Whatever this number is that is about to be released later today in the inflation report isn’t going to surprise me. Probably, you too.
Have you been to the grocery store? Have you bought a plane ticket? Have you filled your tank with gas? It’s insane how much things cost right. I filled up my Jeep last week. $105 dollars. Yes, it was almost empty, but still…
Expect the White House to continue blaming all this on the war in Ukraine and Vladimir Putin. It might stick. An ABC News/Ipsos poll shows that more Americans blame Putin for high gas prices over oil companies or President Biden.
You can make the argument that prices were headed up before the war.
As for the war, it continues. There is a startling new accusation from the former Ukrainian Infrastructure Minister. Volodymyr Omelyan tells Fox News, “Just two hours ago, we received a statement from our army that Putin used chemical weapons in Mariupol.”
If this turns out to be true, now what? I feel like we are getting to the point that we are going to have to do more.
My cousin Nan told me I should watch the “60 Minutes” interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. I watched last night.
First of all, nobody on the planet can tell a story like Scott Pelley. Nobody. Pelley interviewed President Zelensky. Pelley refers to him as “the wartime president.” Find it somewhere. It’s worth your time.
You learn about Zelensky. His past as a standup comedian. His transition to politics. He ran for president of Ukraine and got 73 percent of the vote.
Zelensky comes across as smart and friendly. He is also a leader. He could have easily left Ukraine when the war started. He didn’t. He rallied his people. They stared the Russians down.
Zelensky tells Scott Pelley how they did it: “We united as a nation. Even though our people understood that they would be outnumbered tenfold, and there would be no way out, just no way out, we fought for our existence and for survival. That’s the combined heroism of everyone—of the people, of the authorities, of the armed forces. We became a single fist.”
A single fist. I love that. You have to believe though that as this goes on Zelensky and his people will need more.
Putin’s inflation. Putin’s war. It’s easy to blame Vladimir Putin for all of this. I’m fine with that too.