Treasury Sec Yellen To Face Congress Again

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will face round two on the Hill today as she appears before the House Ways and Means Committee on President Joe Biden's FY23 budget.

• The hearing begins at 10:00 ET 15:00 BST and can be followed here: https://waysandmeans.house.gov/legislation/hearing...
• Yellen will be expecting more sharp questions on inflation following a grilling by the Senate Finance Committee yesterday. Republicans will press the GOP line that inflation was caused by excessive American Rescue Plan spending.
• Yellen is likely to again assert that inflation is exogenous and beyond the control of the government.
• Yellen has received criticism for claiming that inflation would be "transitory" and admitted yesterday that she "probably could have used a better term than transitory" to describe inflation but maintained that inflation is not due to government policy.
• Yellen: "When I said that inflation would be transitory, what I was not anticipating was a scenario in which we would end up contending with multiple variants of COVID that would be scrambling our economy and global supply chains, and I was not envisioning impacts on food and energy prices we've seen from Russia's invasion of Ukraine."
• Yellen is one of the least politically experienced members of President Biden's cabinet and has been thrust into the center of the White House's pivot to the economy ahead of the midterms. Democrats will be hoping that her "straight talking" and largely apolitical approach to Congressional questioning will persuade voters that the administration has a plan to tackle inflation.
• An IPOS poll this week showed fewer than 30% of Americans approve of Biden's handling of the economy.