Oil tankers anchored in the Strait of Hormuz near Bandar Abbas, Iran on May 2, 2026. Amirhosein Khorgooi/ISNA via AP Word that inflation hit 3.8% last month is bad news, but not grim: The main cause is obvious, and it won’t last.
It’s the halt on oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, which plainly won’t last much longer.
So our cautious optimism is entirely different from all that Biden-years talk about inflation being “transitory.”
Notice: Speaker-emerita Nancy Pelosi hypes that inflation is “skyrocketing,” yet she said no such thing at the same point in the Biden years (15 months in), when it was 8.3%.
That was the result of the Biden-Pelosi federal-spending binge, “stimulating” an economy already soaring post-pandemic; getting the rate down would take long months of harsh Federal Reserve interest-rate hikes.
Today’s uptick is a move in the wrong direction — climbing from March’s 3.3%, and marking the highest rate in three years.
But it’s also a reminder that inflation’s been reasonably tame so far under President Donald Trump — and far better than under the last guy.
Rising oil prices accounted for a full 40% of the April jump; strip out energy and food, and “core inflation” stood at just 2.8%; once the Strait reopens, the trend should reverse — albeit not as fast as we’d like.
Look: Inflation was above 3.8% for more than half of Biden’s term; the rise began as soon as he passed his first mega-spending bill, and went all the way to 9.1%, the highest rate in 40 years, in June 2022.
Fed chief Jerome Powell belatedly admitted he was wrong to wait so long to crack down; happily, the Senate just confirmed his replacement, Kevin Warsh, who should prove far more competent.
Warsh is an inflation hawk; as a Fed Board member during and after the Great Recession, he resisted the crazy policies (zero interest rates, “quantitative easing” and other schemes that bailed out the big banks) that produced Obama-era stagnation.
A passing inflation spike is an OK price to pay for ending Iran’s nuclear and terror threats, in our book — and likely its power to ever shut the Strait again, too.
And if Pelosi and her party are truly worried, they should simply demand a quick and thorough rout of Iran.
