I'm Rob Isbitts, and you may know me on Seeking Alpha under the profile name

Sun Garden Investment Publishing.

I also lead the investing group, Sun Garden Yarp, portfolio.

So my guest today, and I've followed her work for a long time and it's great to finally meet

her.

Claudia Somm is the chief economist at New Century Advisors and a former Federal Reserve

economist.

She is also the creator of this SOM rule that is spelled S-A-H-M, if you're

Googling it, which you should. That's a recession indicator, highly regarded expert on

monetary and fiscal policy, had a lot of experience over the years advising key decision

makers at the Fed, at the White House, in Congress. So she's just about done it all

under the topic of economics and economic strategy. So it is a pleasure to welcome Claudia

Sam. Thank you. It's wonderful to be here. I have three questions on the subject of inflation.

First, when you look back just a few years, was it inevitable that we would get higher inflation in 22? And then I want to talk about where the balance

of risks is now and then we're going to hit the T keyword tariffs. To some extent, the pandemic and some of the public health responses,

which I think were necessary,

created an environment that was going to cause inflation.

And then this goes back to what I was talking about with these supply dimensions. right? And it's not, it's not just that, you know, countries shutting down or putting real, you know, public health restrictions on meant that, say, global supply chains really ground to a halt. And so we had, so we had issues in terms of getting goods there. But one one aspect that I don't think

it's talked maybe enough about is, you know, at the very beginning of the pandemic, there were,

there were initially restrictions on people being able to go out and, you know, buy services. And then

even in places that didn't have the restrictions, the pandemic

itself was a restriction, right? People didn't want to get sick. They were afraid. They did. So you saw

...