yes. free money and fucked up supplly chains. some inflation plus some other factors.
Inflation, such as what people are referring to and experiencing in the pandemic, is most often caused by a heated economy where wages, and cost of goods, etc go into an inflationary cycle, were higher wages, lead to higher priced goods, which leads to people pushing for higher wages. It can become a spiraling cycle which is why historically economists would speak to a rising unemployment need, to counter it, as rising unemployment results in less wage hikes.
However during covid that was not the case.
There were two competing factors for governments to try and deal with.
First was the risk of a global recession or even depression in turning off the worlds economy when it came to production and services and everyone staying home and not working. This is caused by liquidity in the markets drying up causing a spiralling effect. The main way to counter that is for government to add liquidity to the markets thru monetary policy. They did this and it worked. Recession talk and depression talk all receded.
HOwever that feeds into the secondary risk, that as the pandemic lifts and people get back to work, the type of inflation in the price of goods and services is going to happen, and increased liquidity via gov't intervention can make that worse.
So you have the cure to one (recession/depression) being the potential fuel for the other, which makes this combination of challenges somewhat unique and more challenging.
That is why many predicted Biden's choices would fail and they would not be able to handle and they predicted doom on the inflation front and a recession, if not depression.
Biden had his experts who believed they could tip toe the line and manage both risks and they PROVED THEY COULD MASTERFULLY.
the proof of that is no country in the world managing it better, balancing their choices in any other way.
You can sit as arm chair quarterback all you like and pretend you know a better path, that no other country could figure out, and that would not have caused a recession, such as not adding any liquidity was sure to do, but what you CANNOT do, is show a single country that handled it better than the US, under Biden.
Contrast that with Trump, under Covid where the US in the absolute bottom tier and we cannot find a single first world country who handled it any worse.
