'The Federal Reserve is doing the greatest harm I could ever imagine.'
Spriggs denounced the bank for ignoring external factors that are driving inflation, including the effects of the climate crisis on global agricultural production., Spriggs"pointed to a major drought affecting rice-growing regions in China, a heat wave in Europe that destroyed much of the corn crop, and massive flooding in Pakistan that wiped out huge swaths of different crops, including 20% of the cotton harvest.
Those crises have pushed global commodity prices up by more than 55% this year, with food commodities up nearly 24%, according to the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development. For U.S. consumers, grocery prices are up more than 13%. "It's dangerous to the moment to tell the American people that the source of inflation is endogenous to the system, that it is related to excess demand," Spriggs told"Nothing could be further from the truth. Diverting us from the actual conversation that we need to be having—we, meaning human beings—is so dire."