Elon Musk agrees that inflation is ‘made in Washington’ — how the world’s wealthiest man protects his riches Moneywise and Yahoo Finance LLC may earn commission or revenue through links in the content below.
As Americans watched their buying power erode through 2021 and 2022, with inflation peaking at a 40-year high of 9.1% in June 2022 (1), pundits offered a long list of factors they blamed for causing the rise in the cost of goods: increased consumer spending, rising labor costs, supply chain disruptions and monetary and fiscal policies
Now, 2026 has brought more of the same with rising costs and inflation struck 4.2% year over year as of May, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data used by the US Inflation Calculator (2). Top Picks – – JP Morgan sees gold hitting $6,000/oz before 2027 — and a Gold IRA lets you hold the physical metal while deferring the tax bill. Get your free guide from Priority Gold – However, if the late Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman — renowned for his work on monetary policy and free-market principles — were still alive, he’d have a more straightforward explanation for the phenomenon.
And it all comes down to a single factor or — more specifically — a certain place. “Inflation is made in Washington because only Washington can create money, and any other attribution to other groups of inflation is wrong,” Friedman once famously stated (3). “Consumers don’t produce it. Producers don’t produce it. The trade unions don’t produce it.