> I suspect the massive money printing going on for years has had no impact because most of that money never actually landed in the hands of actual people and just existed to be sucked up by wall street and elites. And they dont spend in a way to impact prices.

Yes. I think we had something like monetary inflation but it was all captured by the upper 1% and 0.1%. The policies suppressed wages down the Ginni Coefficient ladder and actually contained inflation. This produced low interest rates due to low CPI inflation expectations. But it would up producing what economists call asset bubbles rather than inflation. This has also built up over the past 30-40 years ever since Volker in 1980, it goes way beyond the post-2008 recovery and the pandemic.

We're now seeing the point where this has all become unsustainable, and the masses are clamoring (rightly) to get a share of it. Either we're going to allow that inflation to run downhill now and re-price via inflating wages and suck up the smaller pain of inflation, or I think we're going to have to inflict truly severe economic pain of multiple deep recessions. Given how much people now deeply hate inflation, now that wage inflation has reached the baristas and food service people, it looks like we're going to choose recession.

I think it is more that the earlier money printing addressed more normal, slow moving business cycle issues, and so slowly backing off of it worked exactly as planned. With COVID, the money printing was addressing a fast moving and fast correcting temporary effect of organic and top-down behavior changes in the early part of the pandemic, which snapped back hard with general reopening, meaning the normal pace of unwinding fiscal and monetary stimulus was too slow to prevent the measures meant to prevent catastrophic depression and deflation combining with the rapid economic rebound to produce inflation (there’s some pieces that didn’t rebound which actually exacerbated the inflation effect, e.g., supply chain capacity.)

Another element here is that a lot of that "money printing" went overseas. Agree with what you say, this time it was all sent domestically as part of stimulus checks.