The change over the past two years has been startling. Consumer price inflation, which peaked at 9 percent, is now under 3 percent. And the true inflation picture is arguably even better. U.S. inflation numbers place a large weight on a price nobody pays — the imputed rent on owner-occupied housing, which among other things lags far behind market rental rates. If we measure inflation the way other countries do, without that imputation, we’re all the way down to prepandemic inflation:
Although the unemployment rate has drifted up a bit, it remains historically low — yet as I’ve been saying, inflation appears to have been beaten anyway. What went right?
The simplest, most plausible answer is that high inflation was mainly caused by disruptions related to Covid. The pandemic caused big changes in both how we spent our money and how we worked, and it took time for the economy to adjust.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/20/opinion/inflation-biden-economy.html