Really great reply thank you! I should have known it wouldn't be so clear cut. Thank you for your time, I'm going to dig into the sources you linked now.

Economics question on the current levels of inflation around the world: Milton Friedman once gave this response to the cause of inflation, stating it primarily caused by governments printing money via central banks.

> "Consumers don't produce it, producers don't produce it, the trade unions don't produce it, foreign sheikhs don't produce it, oil imports don't produce it. What produces it is too much government spending and too much government creation of money, and nothing else."

This makes sense to me as printing money dilutes the value of currency, making everything more expensive across the board rather than one specific sector.

Covid caused massive turmoil in March 2020 where indexes dipped more than in 2008, but it only lasted 1.5 months opposed to 2 years because this time governments started printing money to support markets, buying up bonds and other assets.

If you look at the balance sheets of these central banks it shows that they all printed hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars just after March 2020, presumably to keep the markets afloat. Those balance sheets now show a strong correlation with current global inflation levels, just skewed a year or so.

So is that it? Is the main cause of all this inflation just the knock on effect of governments spending their way out of a crash during covid? And if so, it's my understanding that the only way to truly reduce that inflation is to remove the printed money back out via a "market correction" period, aka a crash. Is that right? Insight from experts in the field would be welcome.