“The Fed hiked interest rates around the same time that the supply chain got back up and running, which makes it hard to assign credit. But there’s an even more fundamental issue here. “Anything in macroeconomics is very hard to empirically test,” says Vox senior correspondent Dylan Matthews. “You can’t run experiments with the Fed.”
Ultimately, Matthews says that inflation — and our economy as a whole — is still so hard to understand because of the nature of money. “Money feels like this very hard thing, but money is also a psychological idea. Money is this idea that we can put numbers on what we owe to each other, even as we understand that these numbers are kind of made up.”
Inflation, in a sense, is a psychological phenomenon. “So understanding inflation, I think, is ultimately about understanding people and how they relate to each other. And that’s the ultimate mystery.””
https://www.vox.com/unexplainable/356769/inflation-pandemic-economy-federal-reserve-interest-rates