I don't want anyone to think that I'm just a professor sitting in the ivory tower. I do read. I promise you that I do study this intensely.
Mohamed El-Erian, the very distinguished chief economist, formerly with PIMCO and now with one of the major European financial institutions, was extremely critical of this. He said they drove rates far too low. So did Lawrence Summers. We knew what would happen. When you cut interest rates to that level, it is the same as making a very steep tax cut. You're introducing huge amounts of stimulus. We tend to think of stimulus as only fiscal and not monetary.
What happened? Well, people did exactly what we would expect them to do—they went out and borrowed like there was no tomorrow. I don't think we caused inflation—as we all know, it was caused by the shutting down of supply chains—but we certainly exacerbated inflation.
Very quickly, to your question, I support the interest rate increase, because I don't believe there's any other effective tool in all the western countries that have studied this. It's a blunt, harsh tool, but it works. I lived through it when interest rates hit 20%. We killed inflation under Governor Bouey and Governor Volcker. They brought inflation from 14% down to zero, basically.