Burton Abrams
speaker
27 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Burton Abrams’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It was probably a newscast that talked about the Nixon tapes. And I said, this is what I've been waiting for.
Well, everyone else was interested in Watergate. I was interested in monetary policy.
Arthur Burns had a reputation of being an extremely cautious monetary economist who had written a book called Prosperity Without Inflation.
And all of a sudden, we get the worst decade of inflation probably in U.S. history. And the question I had was, why did he do that? Why did he abandon his prosperity without inflation ideas? And did Nixon play a role in that?
So I almost immediately headed down to Washington, D.C. from Delaware. Like immediately? Yes.
The economy needs to be rolling. Yeah, you had it.
You have to have white hair, spectacles, and a pipe. Apparently, Burns would use the pipe to emphasize statements that he was making. Oh, how does that work? When he was asked a question, he would take time to restuff the pipe, make it more dramatic before he spoke. So that's a good trick.
Eisenhower, to his credit, said there's no way we're going to do that. Unless we have evidence that the economy is entering into a severe recession, we're not going to manipulate the economy for political gain. Nixon was very upset by this, lost the election, and said that's not going to happen again.
The tapes were not extremely accessible. They were available on reels. There were no transcriptions or very few. They certainly didn't transcribe the monetary policy conversations. Sure.
It was a little cassette player. Yeah. And then you had to put on earphones and try to make out the garbled conversations that existed.
People would knock and bang on the table like. Is that true? Can you hear him banging on the table in the Nixon? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. And coffee cups hitting, you know, they serve coffee and the coffee cups would be clattering.
I mean, from a picture you showed yesterday, these people are, they're buying REITs instead of REITs.
Burns is making an appeal to Nixon that he doesn't want to stimulate anymore. He's still holding out.
No. So I suspect that behind the scenes, pressure is still to give Nixon the monetary policy he wants.
The discount rate is the interest rate that the Federal Reserve will lend to banks. So by lowering the discount rate, they're telling banks, come and get it. You can borrow at a lower rate and then make loans. This tends to increase. The money supply.
There's two theories. And one is that Burns thought that the inflation was caused by irrational inflationary expectations and that the stimulus that was going to occur would improve the unemployment situation without exacerbating inflationary pressures.
The other explanation is that he capitulated... And gave in to the pressures imposed on him by Nixon.
The Federal Reserve should not be treated as a branch of the administration.
Yes.
When you get a personal conversation between the president and the Fed, there's too much possibility for a manipulation to take place.
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