The decision by the US government to print trillions of dollars isn’t the only reason why inflation has soared in the US.

Remember, the US government printed trillions of dollars during, and after, the 2007-09 financial crisis and it didn’t lead to inflation like this.

What we’re currently seeing is the consequence of governments around the world having shut down large parts of their economies in 2020 and 2021 to prevent the coronavirus spreading before vaccines existed.

The modern world had never done anything like that - and those shutdowns wreaked havoc on global supply chains.

At the same time, global governments spent trillions of dollars subsidising the wages of workers and businesses to keep people going through the lockdowns, which gave people money to spend. A lot of that money was saved, and lot of it is being used to buy things now.

But also, think about what’s happened to the airline industry, as a single case study of some of the problems we’re seeing. During the lockdowns, airline executives fired pilots and flight crew and baggage handlers, seriously depleting their workforces. Now that flights have resumed, what are we seeing in airports? Chaos. Unbelievably long queues. Lost baggage around the world. Scores of cancelled flights. And soaring prices for tickets. There’s a lot of economics to unpack in that case study. Then, try to think about how other industries might be dealing with their own special problems.

When it comes to Australia’s government, it spent hundreds of billions of extra dollars through the pandemic to keep workers alive and businesses viable, and a huge amount of that money was saved by households.

But the inflation we’re seeing in Australia is not all related to the demand that that extra money is supporting.

This inflation is a global problem, with each country also dealing with their own unique domestic causes of inflation.