Powell's Streak: 65 Months of Above-Target Inflation Echoes Arthur Burns' Great Inflation Legacy

The Federal Reserve's current chair, Jerome Powell, is facing an uncomfortable comparison to Arthur Burns, who presided over much of the Great Inflation in the 1970s. Kevin Warsh, a new Fed Chair, has been reciting a number that highlights this issue: 65 months of above-target inflation.

This streak is measured in years, not quarters, and it's an alarming one for Powell's reputation. As Wiesenthal pointed out on the Odd Lots podcast, high unemployment under your watch does not get penalized to the same degree as high inflation. The Fed chairs who are remembered badly are almost never remembered for jobs.

The benchmark that matters here is core PCE, the Fed's preferred inflation gauge. It sat at 130.66 in July 2026, up from 126.954 in September 2025. Year over year, core PCE printed at 3.34% in July, essentially unchanged from 3.34% in June and 3.46% in May.

Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute, spoke on the same podcast and said Powell was 'late to the game in hiking in 2022' and 'profoundly mistaken to cut multiple times last year.' He expects inflation to hold in a 3.5% to 4.5% range with upside risk until rate hikes bite.