And although the Fed is a major driver of volatility this year, the central bank continues to shirk public responsibility for it.

Last month, for example, the Senate confirmed Mr. Powell for another four-year term as Fed chairman. The vote – more than four to one in favor – reflects the incredibly high level of bipartisan support Mr Powell enjoys. The president, during a meeting at the White House in May, cast Mr. Powell as an ally in the fight against inflation rather than the culprit for much of the financial market volatility this year. “My plan is to fight inflation. It starts with a simple proposition: respect the Fed and respect the independence of the Fed,” the president said.

This leaves room for the Republican Party to blame the woes on Wall Street on the Democratic Party’s inaction. Like Jim Jordan, Republican Congressman from Ohio, expressed it on Twitter recently, “Your 401k is missing President Trump.” This almost certainly portends a Republican line of attack through the summer and fall. Never mind that this rhetoric is the opposite of Mr. Trump’s in 2018 and 2019, when the Fed was tightening and rocking markets. At the time, Mr. Trump attacked Mr. Powell on Twitter and pressured the Fed Chairman to cut interest rates even though the economy was growing. (The Fed complied in the summer of 2019.) But things are different now. Mr. Biden is in office and Fed tightening provides a clear path for the Republican Party to claim majorities in the House and Senate.

Republicans also pointed to Mr Biden’s $1.9 trillion US bailout package, intended to blunt the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, as the cause of runaway inflation. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen dismissed that, noting in testimony before members of Congress: “We see high inflation in almost every developed country in the world. And they have very different tax policies. So it cannot be true that most of the inflation we are experiencing reflects the impact” of the US bailout.

Democrats would be wise to point to the source of the problem: a decade of easy money policies at the Fed, not anything that has been done in the White House or in Congress in the past year and a half.

The real tragedy is that this fall’s election could reinforce the very momentum that created the problem in the first place. During the 2010s, Congress fell into a state of dysfunction and paralysis just when its power to make economic policy was needed most. It is no coincidence that the Fed announced that it would intensify its quantitative easing experiments on November 3, 2010, the day after members of the Tea Party movement took office in the House. The Fed was seen as the only federal agency equipped to forcefully stimulate economic growth as Congress relegated itself to the sidelines.

With prices for gas, food and other goods still rising and the stock market in flux, consumers could still suffer significantly. But Americans shouldn’t fall for the simplistic rhetoric that attributes all of this to Mr. Biden. More than a decade of monetary policy has brought us to this moment, not 17 months of Democratic control in Washington. Voters should be clear-headed about the cause of this economic chaos and vote for the party they think can best get us out of it.