"After several decades of stable prices, inflation went wild in late 2021, peaking at 9 percent in the summer of 2022. By then, the prevailing explanation was that the Biden administration’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan had given people too much money to spend. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers called the bill the “least responsible macroeconomic policy we’ve had in the last 40 years.” All that stimulus, he and other experts argued, had led to too much money chasing after not enough stuff. The only way to tame inflation, according to this view, would be to crush the excess demand by engineering a painful economic slowdown. Heading into 2023, nearly every economist, forecaster, and CEO predicted that a recession was right around the corner. A Bloomberg Economics model put the odds of a recession by October 2023 at 100 percent. Instead, inflation fell steadily while the stock market boomed, unemployment remained below 4 percent, and wages rose faster than prices."