Debate fact check: Inflation climbed from 1.4% to as high as 9.1% under Biden

President Biden attacked former President Trump on Inflation during the presidential debate but it climbed from 1.4% in January 2021 to as high as 9.1% under Biden in June 2022.

In May, CNN published an analysis about Biden falsely claiming Trump left him with 9% inflation. He repeated that claim at the debate on Thursday night.

Trump said he left Biden a country with "essentially no inflation" and "all he had to do is leave it alone" but "he destroyed it."

As the debate went on, Biden walked back his claim, saying Trump left him with "no inflation" because he decimated the economy. 

Biden did not mention the economic downturn that was caused by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which started under Trump in March of 2020.

Biden signed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan early in his term, which some economists have said fueled inflation. The bill extended COVID stimulus programs from bipartisan bills Congress passed under Trump and included additional measures such as an expanded Child Tax Credit. The bill was written by Democrats under budget reconciliation and did not receive any votes from Republicans. 

“I think this is the least responsible macroeconomic policy we’ve had in the last 40 years,” said Larry Summers, a top economic adviser to former President Obama.

According to a Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco analysis from March 2022, "since the first half of 2021, U.S. inflation has increasingly outpaced inflation in other developed countries." The analysis also said "estimates suggest that fiscal support measures designed to counteract the severity of the pandemic’s economic effect may have contributed to this divergence by raising inflation about 3 percentage points by the end of 2021."