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Why Is The Federal Reserve Chairman Talking About Accelerating Inflation?
Isn’t inflation bad?
Nobody wants to pay more for stuff, right? Yet getting inflation running at a little higher rate than it is right now is the main theme Fed Chair Jerome Powell keeps returning to during testimony before the House Financial Services Committee. Powell’s motif seemed to get lost in a lot of the coverage of his testimony, because most news organizations that bothered to cover it at all instead tried to cull things that might provoke another Twitter tirade from Trump now that Powell’s become one of the President’s most notorious nemeses.
So let’s get that stuff out of the way first:
• Powell does seem to be calling for the Fed to cut interest rates, and that cut will probably come as early as this month. This would be the first time in years the Fed has cut rates, going back to the last Recession, when it greatly needed to stimulate the economy to revive it, which is not really the case now. This would be more giving the economy a pacemaker than reviving it after major cardiac arrest.
Trump’s been loudly advocating rate cuts for a while, and arguing “his” economy would be booming even more if the Fed hadn’t held back. So now that the Fed seems to be steering into Trump’s lane, does that mean he was right? Yes it…
