On Thursday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Katy Tur Reports,” host Katy Tur stated that while it’s “not great news,” that inflation increased in July, “It’s not bad news,” when inflation keeps increasing.
Tur said, “New economic data shows inflation picked up during the month of July, but only slightly. It’s not great news, but it is in line with expectations, and it’s likely got the attention of the Federal Reserve.”
Later, Reuters White House Correspondent Jeff Mason stated that the Biden administration wants to ensure “people know what they see — what the administration, anyway, sees as the benefits of this economy, and the numbers today sort of help them. As you said in your intro, it’s not great news when inflation keeps going up. But it’s not as bad as it was.”
Tur responded, “It’s not bad news, yeah.”
Mason continued, “Yeah. And you can see Wall Street reacting very positively to it because they think this means the Fed isn’t going to raise interest rates more.”
Tur added that unemployment is low, there hasn’t been a recession, and the inflation rate has dropped, “it’s still expensive at the grocery store, it still can be expensive, at times, for fuel, it’s kind of fluctuating. But the idea out there is that things are bad, how do you combat that idea when everything does seem to be going in the right direction, yet, people still don’t feel like it’s going in the right direction?”
Mason responded that people feel the economy is bad because they were cooped up during the pandemic, inflation got “really, really high over the last couple of years, and now moderate, but still, eggs are still expensive, beef is still expensive, cars are still expensive.”