In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Joe Biden said that his “top priority is getting prices under control,” as the country faces a period of rapid inflation, the Washington Post reported. The prices of groceries, gasoline, cars and rents have recently shot up, as inflation has increased at the fastest rate in four decades.

Containing inflation has traditionally been the province of the Federal Reserve Bank. The Fed is preparing to act rapidly in the coming months to raise interest rates, which will make money more expensive to borrow and spend, according to the New York Times. Higher rates are meant to slow hiring, wage growth and demand enough to tamp down price increases.

In fact, on Wednesday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told the House Financial Services Committee that the Fed would likely raise interest rates by a quarter-point at its meeting next month, CNN reported. In response, stocks rose sharply. In late morning trading, the Dow was up nearly 550 points, or 1.6 percent. The S&P 500 rose by 1.5 percent and the Nasdaq gained about 1 percent.

Biden acknowledged the role of the Fed, saying, “One way to fight inflation is to drive down wages and make Americans poorer.” He added, “I think I have a better plan to fight inflation.” He said that his administration can take action—such as encouraging corporate competition and strengthening supply chains—so as to slow price increases without dragging down employment and pay.

Biden also stressed that millions of jobs were created during his first year in office, that wages have also increased, and that many aspects of American life have resumed, two years after the coronavirus pandemic began. Specifically, he said that the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, enacted last March, had “created over 6.5 million new jobs just last year, more jobs created in one year than ever before in the history of America.”

The president called on Congress to support several economic initiatives, such as providing monthly tax payments for families with children, lowering prescription drug prices for seniors and raising the minimum wage for millions of workers. Many of these initiatives originated last year in a $2 trillion proposal known as the Build Back Better Act.  The bill failed to pass in the Senate because of the opposition of two Democrats.

Biden also put forward some new initiatives, including an effort to ensure that trillions of dollars in existing federal spending to combat the coronavirus pandemic did not fall into the hands of criminals.

Biden’s State of the Union address was originally intended to focus mostly on the economy. But the international crisis in Ukraine, among other issues, forced the White House to refocus some of the speech. He began by talking about Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, pointing to his administration's work, alongside Europe, in imposing extraordinary economic sanctions on Russia.

In the Republicans’ official rebuttal, which was aired after Biden’s State of the Union address, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) blamed the president and his Democratic allies in Congress for “runaway inflation” saying that it resulted from their significant increase in spending.