If you have excess currency you can translate that excess into demand. If supply can’t fulfill the demand then goods are more scarce than money and suppliers charge more hence inflation. However if inflation is high and interest rates are low growth will happen as people outlay capital towards meeting the supply for the demand and prices will drop as the overall economy expands - more supply, more demand - that’s growth. So “printing money” can spur growth, which is generally what we shoot for - right or wrong. Raising interest rates slows capital investment but also draws money out of the economy. It also causes inflation because the cost of goods and services bought on credit or services that operate on revolving financing see higher fees and rates. We don’t normally see that as inflation but if you measure costs not by sticker costs but by fully loaded costs you see the inflation. It also has the effect of people returning money from investment markets to debt markets for return which locks currency away temporarily.

All that makes sense if you don’t believe you can increase supply to simply meet demand and experience growth. It feels like keeping interest rates low, allowing a transient period of inflation, then working on some offsetting deflation later would be a smarter play than making everyone more poor and unemployed than before to ensure they can’t afford to buy food, decreasing the cost of food.