At a central bankers’ conference in Portugal last week, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell congratulated himself on his fight against inflation, leading markets to rally back home. But it must have been impossible for him to have missed that his European hosts were able to boast of much better success.

This is bad news for President Joe Biden, who continues to insist that his deficit spending had nothing to do with price rises. Inflation, Biden and his defenders contend, has been a global phenomenon.