A fairly remarkable thing happened earlier this week. Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell admitted to Congress that his planned interest rate hikes wouldn’t do anything about the two biggest drivers of this inflation crisis — but he was willing to risk a recession and go ahead with them anyway.

Asked point-blank by several Senate Banking Committee members whether his rate hikes would lower the price of gas or food, Powell repeatedly made clear they wouldn’t.

“We know that our tools can’t affect certain aspects of inflation and that would include certainly energy inflation and food inflation,” Powell told the committee. Later, Powell acknowledged that “increasing commodity prices are clearly connected to the war in Ukraine,” before admitting that “we don’t think that we have the answer to higher oil prices due to the global oil situation.”