If the disruption of supply chains is the actual culprit for inflation, shouldn't we observe gradual deflation as they recover?
If on the other hand it's printing money (as I'd expect from the trillions of free money in recent months) it should only get worse. What I observe is more consistent with money printing than disruption of supply chains
in some ways you already are - the price of gasoline and even diesel have eased significantly over the last few months, for example. Long term, that will pull prices of energy-intensive products (shipping, etc).
However, "prices are sticky", they go up quickly and go down slowly. Companies aren't going to race to bring their margins back down, if people are paying X then they'll keep prices at X. Especially if they are worried that prices might continue increasing in the future - this is the "inertial" part of inertial inflation, it isn't just about inflation itself but about managing expectations in the economy around future inflation. So far there supposedly hasn't been a big inertial component but who knows.
Really what we needed to discourage it was a massive windfall profits tax - the Fed is also basically saying that we need actual fiscal policy here and that they don't really have the tools to manage this like they want - but this gets back to "there are 48 definite no votes for any bill, and we're dependent on what we can get those last 2 senators to agree to". The fed is using the only levers it has, and that lever is "a gut-shot to aggregate demand for the next decade", that is not the right policy tool but it's the only one that congress can't block.
This is why you don't throw gasoline on the fire during 2018-2019 when the economy is already going gangbusters, because when the economy inevitably dipped, suddenly those policy tools like government spending become much more "expensive" to implement when there's already tons of money sloshing around the economy.
>If the disruption of supply chains is the actual culprit for inflation, shouldn't we observe gradual deflation as they recover?
Both China (most importantly) and Russia (to a lesser extent) have not recovered. China seems to be getting worse with a historic once-in-a-century heatwave and drought that is currently destroying productivity.
If on the other hand it's printing money (as I'd expect from the trillions of free money in recent months) it should only get worse. What I observe is more consistent with money printing than disruption of supply chains