Shadowing Practice: The Inflation Problem... It's Worse Than You Think - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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Right now, everyone's blaming inflation on the Middle East.
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That's the narrative we're being told and everyone's accepted it.
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And it makes sense why.
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It's easy to follow.
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There's a clean cause and a clean effect.
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It's so simple you can draw it on a napkin.
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Except there's one problem with this story.
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The Federal Reserve keeps its own inflation scoreboard.
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They don't use the number you see in the headlines.
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They target 2% inflation measured by personal consumption expenditures, the PCE.
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That's the scoreboard that counts.
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That's also where the mainstream story falls apart.
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The conflict in the Middle East started in February, just five months ago, but the Federal Reserve's measure has now missed the inflation target for 63 months in a row,
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more than five years straight.
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The PCE currently sits at a little over 4%, more than double the Fed's target, and is continuing to climb,
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so everyone's using a five-month-old story to diagnose a five-year-old problem.
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And this isn't just a number that only matters to economists.
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This single number lies at the foundation of every economic decision in the United States, And every rate you pay is priced off what people expect that number to be.
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Your mortgage, your car loan, what your savings account pays you, what the cash in your wallet is worth next year.
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So it's worth asking, what's actually going on?
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Because there's clearly more to the inflation story.
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Inflation in this country used to move like a pendulum.
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It would swing up, swing back down, and eventually come to rest around that 2% number.
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You never questioned it, because you never had to.
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even had a name for this period of American history, the Great Moderation.
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From 1985 to 2007, growth was steady, inflation was low, and the whole economy looked like it regulated itself.
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Except it didn't.
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There was no invisible hand.
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There was a real one, someone standing beside the pendulum, giving it a firm push back toward the middle every single time it swung too far,
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done so reliably for so long that everyone forgot the pendulum was being pushed at all.
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That's what the last five years are actually about.
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The thing doing the pushing is now the one in trouble.
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But before we get there, we need to look closer at that 2% number itself.
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For a number the entire financial system is anchored to, you'd assume it fell out of some impossibly complex math equation,
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or it was carved in stone and passed down generations.
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Well, neither.
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Somebody chose it.
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So why the 2%?
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Here's St. Louis Federal Reserve economist Christopher Neely explaining how they landed on that 2% target number.
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When central banks were considering what sort of an inflation rate to target,
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they were really trading off the costs of having inflation with the benefits of having some upward movement in prices,
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which might have benefits in terms of allowing central banks to stabilize the macroeconomy.
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So 2% was kind of a happy medium.
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So while the target number itself may have come from an arbitrary decision, there's still reasoning behind it.
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But why not go lower?
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Why not go to zero?
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That's the obvious question.
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If inflation's the thing quietly making everything more expensive, why aim for any of it at all?
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Because while on paper, a zero percent inflation rate sounds great, in reality, it's not.
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When a recession hits, the Fed's main move is to cut interest rates.
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In a world with zero inflation, rates already sit near the floor.
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So the second a real economic downturn arrives, the Fed gets one cut, maybe two, and then slams into zero, structurally trapped and out of road.
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That's how an ordinary recession can spiral into a decade-long depression.
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But you can't aim too high either.
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Push it to 4%, and prices double every 18 years.
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Businesses can't forecast their cost, and nobody can price a long-term contract without guessing.
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So 2% is that Goldilocks number, high enough to keep a cushion between the economy and catastrophe, low enough that you barely notice it on an ordinary Tuesday.
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But actually hitting that number, year after year, is close to impossible.
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It takes a balancing act so unforgiving, it would make Evel Knievel sweat.
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And for the last few decades, the Fed made this balancing act look effortless.
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We're just now finding out how easy it was, now that things have changed.
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But before I get into that, a quick pause.
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Because we've been talking about the big picture trends shaping the economy, but let's take a look at something much closer to home.
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Your cell phone carrier.
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It starts when you sign up.
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They only collect what's necessary to connect you.
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Then comes the data your phone creates just by using it, like who you call and text.
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While traditional carriers hoard this data for years, CAPE deletes that information after just 24 hours.
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But that's not all.
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It's one of the most sensitive pieces of information about you, yet you're constantly forced to hand it out.
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Promo code CASUAL33.
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Thank you to CAPE for sponsoring this video.
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Now back to the Federal Reserve's World Class Balancing Act.
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For the last few decades, we managed to control inflation.
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The walk towards the 2% target looked effortless.
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But it only looked effortless because the tightrope was 6 inches off the ground.
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And the only reason we know that is because we've seen what the same walk looks like 60 feet up.
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But I'm trying to be a more positive guy these days.
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So before I show you the ugly, let me show you the good part.
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Back when the Feds still had room to work with.
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Let's rewind to the late 70s.
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Inflation wasn't drifting anymore.
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It was sprinting.
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It peaked at over 13.5%.
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At that pace, prices double in about nine years.
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The dollar in your pocket was rotting while you held it, and every single person could feel it happening.
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So who do you call when inflation is out of control?
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No. Not Ghostbusters.
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You call 6'7", cigar-smoking Paul Volcker, the kind of man who looks like he eats recessions for breakfast.
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Volcker takes over as Fed chair in 1979 and does the one thing nobody else had the stomach for.
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He drives interest rates to 20%.
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He deliberately triggers not one recession, but two, back to back, strangling the money supply until inflation has nothing left to feed on.
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It was so aggressive, it earned a name of its own, the Volcker Shock.
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And it worked.
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Inflation went from over 13.5% down to bottoming out under 2% in the late 80s.
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So take a look at the timeline.
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From 1980 to 1983, Volcker tightens monetary policy aggressively, triggers two back to back recessions and successfully drops inflation by more than 10 points.
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Two years later, the United States enters the Great Moderation Era, a 23-year-long period defined by steady growth and historically low economic volatility.
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Which raises the obvious question, the one probably forming in your head right now, if it worked for Volcker, why can't the Fed just run the same playbook again today?
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It's because he had one advantage nobody talks about, the country could absorb the damage.
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When Volcker first claimed the throne, the national debt was about a quarter the size of the economy.
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By today's standards, pretty much nothing.
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So when he drove rates to 20%, it was brutal, but it was clean.
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Raising rates did the one thing he intended it to do, slam the brakes.
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But that world is gone.
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The national debt is now sitting around 100% of GDP, a one-to-one match with the entire economy.
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The last time it was this high was the Second World War, but the number is only half of it.
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The other half is what the number does.
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When the Fed raises rates now, it presses down in two places at once.
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The first is the breaks.
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Higher rates, pricier loans, less borrowing and a slower economy.
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Simple.
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The second is hidden underneath and quietly emerges by accident.
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Higher rates also mean the government pays more interest on what it already owes.
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And that bill is not small.
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Net interest is running around a trillion dollars a year, more than the entire military budget.
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In 2021, interest ate about 9% of every dollar the federal government collected.
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This year, it's 19%.
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But those interest payments don't just vanish from the economy.
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It lands in the hands of the pension funds, banks, foreign governments, and other investors who lent the US government money in the first place.
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So every time the Fed raises rates to cool the economy down, it also raises the size of the check that gets written and paid out, which then gets spent, lended out,
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or rolled into the next bond at the new higher rate.
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Which basically means the same move that's supposed to pull money out of the economy starts quietly sending it back in.
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So one foot presses the brake, the other one quietly presses the gas.
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And the heavier the debt, the harder that second foot pushes.
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At 25% of GDP, you barely feel it.
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At 100%, both pedals are floored and the brake is wired to the accelerator.
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Two economists saw this danger coming in 1981.
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Thomas Sargent and Neil Wallace predicted it in one of the most influential macroeconomic papers of the last 50 years.
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While the title doesn't exactly scream page turner, and it's not exactly the easiest read.
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In fact, I'd probably rather watch paint dry than read through it a second time.
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The stuff inside it is very interesting.
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They warn that if the government never runs a surplus, the central bank can't make the debt smaller.
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All it gets to decide is what form the debt takes, bonds or cash.
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Those are the two options.
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So when the Fed fights inflation, it's squeezing the cash side, which means the bond side has to grow to make up the difference.
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And bonds pay interest.
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So the longer the Fed holds the line, the faster that pile of debt compounds.
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So the tightening that brings inflation down today is the same thing that forces somebody to print later.
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Meaning the Fed isn't actually addressing the root of the problem.
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They're not actually fighting the inflation, they're just postponing it.
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And if you think this is just some doomer theory from 1981 with no bearing on today, well guess what?
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A few weeks ago the new Fed chair Kevin Warsh launched five new task forces to tackle different economic problems.
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One of them is an inflation frameworks task force to reassess how the Fed measures, understands, and responds to structural drivers of inflation.
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Three people were picked to lead this team.
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One of them is Thomas Sargent.
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The man who co-wrote the paper from 45 years ago is
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now being asked by the Fed to lead a team tackling the inflation issues.
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So inflation is clearly a concern for the Federal Reserve.
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But when you step outside and look around, it's quiet.
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Gas got cheaper last month.
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The headlines said cooling, you might even think this whole thing already sorted itself out.
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But the thing people forget is the ground is always the last thing to shake.
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By the time you feel an earthquake under your feet, the fault lines slipped a while ago and the impact's already on its way to you.
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The inflation numbers you see in the headlines are that ground.
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They move last.
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Housing is the clearest example.
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It's more than 35% of the entire basket the headline number is built on, and it's the slowest moving piece in it, because rents lock in for a year and reset in steps.
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So a big chunk of today's reading is measuring pressure that was released months ago.
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When the headlines say everything's calm, it's telling you the ground held.
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Yesterday.
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Waiting on the inflation number means finding out last.
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You need to work backwards to get to the truth.
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When you strip everything away, inflation is one thing, price is going up.
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But a price only goes up if somebody actually pays the higher one.
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And nobody pays more without having more to pay with.
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So the money moves first.
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Every time.
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And there's a number that measures exactly that.
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It's called M2.
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It's one of the main ways economists measure how much money is sloshing around the system.
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Think of it as all the cash within arm's reach of the economy.
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After 2020, the line goes pretty much vertical.
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The M2 money supply is currently growing at over 5.5% a year, the fastest pace since July 2022.
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But money doesn't reappear on its own, somebody has to put it there.
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So if inflation's the enemy, who exactly is quietly pumping fresh dollars back into the system?
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The answer's the Federal Reserve.
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To see how, you need to understand the least understood tool the Fed owns.
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Forget interest rates for a second.
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There's a second lever.
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This one's hidden in the back of Jerome Powell's closet, and it only comes out in case of an emergency.
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It's a literal money printer.
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When the economy's dying, like in 2020, the Fed creates money out of thin air and uses it to buy bonds, pushing that new money into the system to keep it alive.
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That flood of new money is called quantitative easing, and in the pandemic, they ran it harder than at any point in history.
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The Fed's balance sheet went from around $4 trillion to nearly $9 trillion in about two years, leading to inflation spiking to over 9% in June 2022.
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But when inflation caught fire, the Fed was forced to do something they've only done twice in its more than 100-year history.
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They ran the money printer in reverse.
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Instead of creating money to buy bonds, the Fed let the bonds it already held expire and didn't replace them.
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Every month, a little less money in the system than the month before.
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This policy is called quantitative tightening, and it started in June of 2022.
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Over the next three and a half years, the Fed took more than $2.2 trillion off its balance sheet.
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It worked well enough that the money supply itself contracted, which sounds minor, but it's not.
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The last time the amount of money in the American economy meaningfully shrank was the Great Depression.
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But you also can't tighten forever.
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The United States financial system needs a certain amount of cash just sitting in it to function day to day, and if you drain past that line, things start breaking.
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So on December 1st of last year, the Fed announced quantitative tightening was over.
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They'd successfully taken out about half of the more than $5 trillion that was injected in the financial system during the pandemic.
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But then Jerome Powell snuck back out of the closet and turned the engine back on.
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Eleven days later, on December 12th, the Fed started buying bonds again, around $40 billion a month.
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The balance sheet it spent three and a half years draining is now refilling.
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So all this leaves us with a country running two very different stories at the same time.
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The first one shows up in the monthly reports, the headline numbers.
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That's the story everybody argues about, and you get a new story every 30 days.
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The second runs underneath all of it, the structural stuff.
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The Congressional Budget Office now estimates the deficit for this fiscal year will reach $1.4 trillion.
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That's 5.8% of the entire economy and far above the previous 50-year average of 3.8%.
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The total national debt is closing in on $40 trillion, and the interest we pay on that debt is now over a trillion dollars a year.
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In 2021, interest ate about 9 cents out of every dollar the federal government collected.
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This year it's 19.
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It more than doubled in five years.
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Interest is now the third largest line in the entire federal budget.
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We spend more on it than we spend on the entire military.
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The debt snowball is playing out exactly as Thomas Sargent and Neil Wallace warned.
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So how do we actually fix this mess?
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The best answer I've seen comes from the golden boy of the finance world, Warren Buffett.
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He was asked how he would deal with the deficit.
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Here's what he said.
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I get in the deficit in five minutes.
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How?
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You just pass a law that says that anytime there's a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election.
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Now you've got the incentives in the right place, right?
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So it's capable of being done.
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A law that bars every sitting member of Congress from re-election anytime the deficit runs past 3% of GDP.
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He was laughing when he said it, but he's also completely right.
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We have an incentives problem.
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It's not just a problem on the left, or just a problem on the right.
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It's an American problem.
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Both parties do it.
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Think about how somebody actually gets a job in Congress.
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They campaign on promises, telling you they'll do this and that, because that's what wins.
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Nobody builds a career in Congress promising people less, so the incentives only point one direction, spending more.
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Which is how the national deficit has run past 3% of GDP for pretty much the entire 21st century.
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It hasn't just been an expensive couple of years, it's structural spending.
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We've been spending more than we bring in for a quarter of a century straight.
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The problem with going down this path is, it compounds.
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The more we borrow, the more interest we owe.
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The more interest we owe, the more we have to borrow.
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It's a never-ending, repeating cycle.
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We're on an unsustainable path that will eventually have to come to an end.
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And every year we put this off, the bill to deal with it just gets bigger.
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I'm curious to hear where other people land on this.
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Is this something we need to deal with now, or are people crashing out over nothing?
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Drop a comment and let me know.
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I'll be reading through them.
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Maybe Buffett's plan is too extreme.
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Or maybe it isn't extreme enough.
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We can argue about the right solution all day, but what we can't argue about is that this doesn't fix itself.
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Something eventually has to change.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “The Inflation Problem... It's Worse Than You Think”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: inflation, Fed, rate, interest. This video has 258 sentences and 3195 words to shadow. The speech runs for 16:44. The speaker talks fast, about 191 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 84% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| inflation noun | /ɪnˈfleɪ.ʃən/ | An act, instance of, or state of expansion or increase in size, especially by injection of a gas or liquid. |
| headline noun | /ˈhɛd.laɪn/ | The heading or title of a magazine or newspaper article. |
| deficit noun | /ˈdɛfəsɪt/ | Deficiency in amount or quality; a falling short; lack. |
| recession noun | /ɹɪˈsɛʃn̩/ | The act or an instance of receding or withdrawing. |
| quietly adverb | /ˈkwaɪ.ɪt.li/ | Producing little or no noise. |
| tighten verb | /ˈtaɪ.tən/ | To make tighter. |
| economist noun | /iˈkɑ.nə.mɪst/ | An expert in economics, especially one who studies economic data and extracts higher-level information or proposes theories. |
| effortless adjective | /ˈɛfə(ɹ)tlɪs/ | Without effort. |
| pendulum noun | /ˈpɛnd͡ʒələm/ | A body suspended from a fixed support so that it swings freely back and forth under the influence of gravity, commonly used to regulate various devices such as… |
| quantitative adjective | /ˈkwɑn.təˌteɪ.tɪv/ | Of a measurements and data types: based on some quantity or number rather than on some quality. |
| incentive noun | /ɪnˈsɛntɪv/ | Something that motivates, rouses, or encourages. |
| structural adjective | /ˈstɹʌk(t͡)ʃəɹəl/ | Of, relating to, or having structure. |
| scoreboard noun | A large board that displays the score in a game or contest. | |
| printer noun | /ˈpɹɪntɚ/ | One who makes prints. |
| borrow verb | /ˈbɑɹ.oʊ/ | To receive (something) from somebody temporarily, expecting to return it. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| find out verb | To discover, as by asking or investigating. |
| go up verb | To move upwards. |
| read through verb | To thoroughly read something to check or proofread it. |
| run past verb | To bring an idea or proposal to the attention of (someone) in order to obtain their opinion. |
| back down verb | To take a less aggressive position in a conflict than one previously had, or has planned to have. |
| check out verb | To record the departure or withdrawal of someone or something (such as guests, employees, books, etc.). |
| close in on verb | To enclose around; to tighten or shrink; to collapse. |
| come out in verb | to be afflicted by (a visible disruption of the body) |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- They only collect what's necessary to connect you.
- There's also your phone number.
- I'll be reading through them.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | we've been talking · We've been spending |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | being told · is priced · being pushed |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has now missed · have changed · we've seen |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | man who looks · side, which means · man who co |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 40 contractions and reduced forms, such as can't, doesn't, isn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: underneath /ˌʌndɚˈniθ/, throne /θɹəʊ̯n/, mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/, earthquake /ˈɝθkweɪk/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: inflation /ɪnˈfleɪ.ʃən/, recession /ɹɪˈsɛʃn̩/, structural /ˈstɹʌk(t͡)ʃəɹəl/, cushion /ˈkʊʃən/, verification /ˌvɛ.ɹə.fɪˈkeɪ.ʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: economist /iˈkɑ.nə.mɪst/, quantitative /ˈkwɑn.təˌteɪ.tɪv/, accelerator /əkˈsɛl.əˌɹeɪ.tɚ/, catastrophe /kəˈtæstɹəfi/, verification /ˌvɛ.ɹə.fɪˈkeɪ.ʃən/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like inflation, headline, deficit.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.