Although Americans say they don’t like paying the current level of prices for goods and services that resulted from the worst bout of inflation in 40 years, they can take comfort from the fact that those prices, while admittedly not coming down in most cases, are actually becoming more affordable.

Back in March, “the Fed is behind the curve” was the prevailing narrative of too little, too late when it came to containing inflation.

Wherever you get your news, there's no escaping the perception that rising prices are breaking the US economy. Recession is almost a foregone conclusion on the Bloomberg terminal, which aggregates 150,000 news sources with every bulletin categorized and counted. Headlines with the word “inflation,” increased 345% to 186,000 times a month since the beginning of 2020, while “strong economy” declined 48% to 1,766 times monthly.

For all the histrionics, from the 2018 tweet “considering taking Tesla private” for which he incurred a $20 million fine from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to smoking weed during a podcast and his latest foray offering to buy Twitter Inc. for about $43 billion, Elon Musk is a pretty good business manager. In fact, the chief executive officer of the world's most valuable automaker has no equal.

If you’re looking for a case-study in economic groupthink, try Googling the phrase “Fed behind the curve.” Informed opinion, it seems, has congealed behind a conventional wisdom that the U.S. Federal Reserve has been too slow to restrain accelerating inflation.

Fear of inflation has a partisan flavor: People tend to feel better about economic prospects when their political party is in power and worse when it isn’t.

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