The Fed's Powell will have to play politics to keep his job
foxbusiness.comVoters in New Hampshire shared whether the state of the economy was a concern for them ahead of the 2024 election, with some citing continued high costs.
It’s time to put to rest the naïve belief that the Federal Reserve under Chairman Jerome Powell is apolitical or data-dependent. It’s neither, and its behavior proves it. The political pressure on the Fed has turned it into just another arrow in the quiver of the big spenders in Washington.
When Powell was up for renomination, he dutifully kept interest rates below 1% percent and exploded the Fed’s balance sheet, barely keeping it below $9 trillion in an unprecedented act of money creation. When asked about raising interest rates three-quarters of a percent in the face of 40-year-high inflation, Powell said such a move was off the table and called inflation «transitory.»
Once the Senate confirmed him for a second term as chairman, however, Powell promptly delivered four of those three-quarter-percent interest rate hikes in a row and began reducing the Fed’s balance sheet to belatedly fight runaway inflation.
US ECONOMY GREW FASTER THAN EXPECTED DURING THE 4TH QUARTER
Why wait until after he was reconfirmed to raise rates aggressively and reduce the money supply? It’s because the short-term effect of such moves by the Fed tends to be a slowdown in economic growth, including a rise in unemployment.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has a job that is much more political than people want to admit. Here, he speaks during a news conference after a Federal Open Market Committee meeting on September 20, 2023, at the Federal Reserve in Washington (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Shutting off the spigot of printed money also tends to pop asset bubbles and
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