I will quote it to you from the sacred ancient texts:
Cutting back money supply growth will slow down economic activity and raise unemployment because it makes capital less available. That will happen instantly, because tightening the availability of capital is central bank's one and only lever to influence the money supply. Delayed, on the other hand, is the response of prices and interest rates, which will only stabilize when people are confident that the money supply is going to stop increasing as fast. That means there will be a tough period after the fix is implemented, before things improve.
That creates a problem where democratic governments are stuck trying to get their economies to "take their medicine," dooming the metrics (and real people's prosperity) for their term so that the other politician who replaces them can claim credit. That's not likely to happen, so we get long inflationary periods that continue until it gets so bad that people demand the tough solution and are willing to stomach it. The OP blames "populism" because a democratic society cannot do such a thing until the people agree, while a society controlled by elites could force-feed the public their "medicine" and still be in power to enjoy the benefits when it was over.
Having only a few, highly entrenched and powerful people control the central bank lengthens the time horizons over which it can average the results of its decisions, but that is not the only way to get inflation under control. The other route is to shorten the time between the institution of the austere policy and the time when people believe it is there to stay. Milton Friedman famously proposed a constitutional amendment, but there are other ways to make it difficult for Congress to change direction.
Populism blinds the public from understanding the true root cause of our problems and therefore destines our solutions to fail.
In this case, the populism is Biden’s admin labeling inflation as the ‘Putin Price Hike’. This completely ignores the possibility that the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, $2 Trillion in stimulus that’s largely already spent, could’ve contributed to inflation also. This leaves us vulnerable to repeat our mistakes when making future policy decisions - like whether to waive all student debt.
From what I've read, stimulus in infrastructure building is rarely correlated with inflation, provided the new infrastructure is useful to continued growth/expansion.
I wonder if anyone hears Psaki or others say "Putin Price Hike" without thinking "a bunch of lying politicians" since Putin's craziness came long after the printing of money.