The 2022-2024 Inflation Crisis
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What students do
- Trace the 2022 inflation surge from its four causes (stimulus, supply chains, energy, pent-up demand) through the Fed's eleven-hike response
- Brief senior Fed staff as policy advisor Jordan Chen on what the 2022-2024 episode teaches about the next shock
- Evaluate whether the Fed's rate hikes produced a soft landing, using the CPI peak and unemployment data from the lesson
- Match the Russia-Ukraine war to the specific inflation cause it triggered
What it covers
- Why CPI peaked at 9.1% in June 2022, the highest rate in over forty years
- The four causes that converged, pandemic stimulus, supply-chain disruption, the energy shock, and pent-up demand
- The eleven rate hikes that added 5.25 percentage points between 2022 and 2023
- The soft-landing debate over whether the Fed cooled inflation without hurting employment
Learning targets
- Trace the 2022-2024 inflation surge from causes through the Fed's response
- Identify the four main drivers of the surge: stimulus, supply chains, energy, pent-up demand
- Evaluate whether the Fed achieved a soft landing by late 2024
From one teacher to another
Four separate causes converged in 2022, so I built Jordan Chen's policy-advisor briefing to force students to hold all four in their head at once instead of blaming inflation on one villain. I left the soft-landing question open on purpose since economists still argue about it themselves, and I want students citing the actual CPI and unemployment numbers from the lesson, not repeating what they've heard at home. This is the toolkit for students who lived through 2022 grocery prices and never had the causes explained to them.
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