We have a major beef with Fed Chairman Jerome Powell.
He refuses to use his bully pulpit to tongue-lash Biden and Congress for the $6 trillion spending binge over the past two years. This multi-trillion smorgasbord of spending is the proximate cause of all the country’s toxic financial problems – including high and non-transitory inflation, the mini-bank crisis triggered by the swift near-500 basis point rise in rates, and the 14-month bear market in stocks. That the Fed’s hundreds of brainiac Ph.D. economists can’t connect these dots is more than a little worrisome.
A good Fed chief – like superstars Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan – relentlessly attacked Congress for accelerating federal spending and debt. Volcker and Greenspan acted as Congress’s fiscal conscience.
Powell is doing the opposite:
It’s not true.
The Biden budget proposes a world-record $7 trillion of spending – almost $2 trillion above the pre-Covid baseline – and mega-taxes on investment that would crash the economy. Meanwhile, the debt is now expected to be $7 trillion higher over the next decade than the forecast when Trump left office.
The greatest economic and security threat to America is Mach 5 spending – and Powell should be telling Congress that if they would simply take a chainsaw to the hundreds of billions of dollars of waste in the budget, he wouldn’t have to be raising interest rates nine times.