Larry Summers’s “victory” in the Great COVID Inflation Debate can be dated quite precisely: it came on November 22, 2021. That’s when Jerome Powell announced that the Federal Reserve would stop characterizing high post-COVID inflation rates as “transitory.” The announcement was largely symbolic, of course. But it was part of a broader Fed policy U-turn that followed months of accelerating price rises and mounting criticism from the likes of Summers, who had been flagellating the Fed for its alleged nonchalance on inflation.

Since that date, the media have treated the former treasury secretary as an oracle: the man who saw it all coming. Just a week before Powell’s announcement, Summers’s column in the Washington Post had borne the snarling, alpha-male headline: “On inflation, it’s past time for team ‘transitory’ to stand down.” And lo, “team transitory” — meaning those at the Federal Reserve and elsewhere who had been predicting that high post-COVID inflation rates would go away on their own without the need for a recession — by and large stood down.

Since he first started sounding the inflation alarm in early 2021, the core of Summers’s argument has been that Biden’s stimulus, combined with the Federal Reserve’s failure to promptly counteract its effects with monetary tightening, had overheated the economy, and that unless the Fed engineered a sharp rise in unemployment (and most likely a recession) to quash the resulting inflationary dynamic, high inflation would become entrenched, eventually forcing the Fed to take even harsher action down the road.