WATCH: CNBC Host Corners Fed Spokesman For Misleading Americans On Inflation

On the Sunday morning edition of SquawkBox on CNBC, host Steve Liesman cornered Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari for misleading the American people over inflation.

Liesman pressed Kashkari, noting that the entire Fed said inflation was just going to be “transitory” but now it appears they’re all reversing course on a whim.

“It basically boils down to this, what if you’re wrong?,” Liesman began. “You were all on team transitory, and it turned out to be not so much transitory, and now you’re all like ‘inflation is not coming down, we need to go to 5%, come hell or high water’ pretty much. What have you guys changed about how you do your business so now I can believe ‘oh you got it right this time’? Give me some confidence here because there’s a lot of reason not to have confidence,” asked the CNBC host.

“I would say that something I have learned a lot over the past year or two that our models that we used to rely on forecasting inflation really failed in understanding the dynamics of re-opening from the pandemic,” Kashkari began, blaming the “models” for the Fed’s failures.

“And then that just told me we have a job to do, we know that raising rates can put a lid on inflation, we need to raise rates aggressively, and that’s challenging because there are lags that you’re well aware of. But the most important thing that people should take away from this is we’re totally committed to get inflation back down to 2%. Not 2.5, not 3. get it back down to 2%. Now is it going to take two years or a little longer, I’m not exactly sure.“, he added.

Watch:

"You were all on team transitory. Now, you're saying 'inflation is not coming down'. What if you're wrong?" CNBC asks Fed's Kashkari. pic.twitter.com/cfecirpPcb

— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) February 19, 2023

Then the CNBC host turned to a Fed survey that they ran and told Kashkari point blank “A lot of people think that you’re not relying on the data, that you’re going to 5% no matter what, which is kind of like saying ‘we’re driving the car into a brick wall’?”.

“Yeah, I don’t agree with that at all,” Kashkari responded before dodging the question entirely.

The question is, will Biden and the Fed be held accountable for lying to the American people about inflation?