Catherine Rampell
speaker
759 appearances
7 recordings
4 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 12 Jun
Catherine Rampell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And it did happen in like very initially at the beginning of Tariffmageddon. We saw rates come down a little bit and he was like, aha, see, I'm reducing interest rates and the Fed is behind. And because, you know, Trump loves low interest rates. But then, in fact, this weird thing happened that Larry's talking about where where long term interest rates went.
That's not usually what you would expect. And so there's been some debate about why that might be happening. It might be that everybody's totally freaked out and they just want to hold cash. They're like, I'm not going to take my sellings from the stock market and put it into bonds. I'm just going to like hang tight and put it under my mattress or whatever. Could be that.
Well, it could be good advice if we didn't have high inflation, which may be what's going on here. So there are some questions about maybe it's that people are just holding on to the cash. Maybe it's that they're expecting higher inflation, which could happen as a result, sort of trend inflation could happen as a result of all of these tariffs.
You know the tariffs are going to raise prices at least one time, like when they initially go into place. The question is, will they feed on themselves and will continue to have higher inflation going forward? And that's quite possible. Another possibility, which is what I think...
Larry is raising, and there's some evidence for this, is that it's not that people are just like taking the cash and holding on to it. They're like, I do not want any money in the United States. So it looks like they might be investing it in like Japanese or Swiss or German bonds instead, which is not a good sign.
That's great. They're good guys now. Yeah, they're good guys now. So, yeah, so it could very well be that people are like, screw that the U.S. economy is too risky. I do not trust this maniac who is in charge, who is potentially screwing up not just the U.S. economy, but the global economy. I want my money back. out. I will invest it in something else. I'm not going to hold cash.
I'm just going to invest it in something else that looks safer by comparison to U.S. Treasuries, which is a really bad sign because historically, U.S. Treasuries have been considered the safest of safe assets. That's part of the reason why we enjoy the dollar as the global reserve currency because everybody trusts that The U.S. is safe. We're going to pay off our bills and blah, blah, blah, blah.
And that's like the benchmark for everything else. We are we are how you determine what is safe and then everything else is like a little bit less safe. But how much? So that's not what we're seeing right now. So, again, we don't know exactly what's happening. Given some of the evidence we've seen, probably Larry is at least partly right.
And, you know, really not a good long term sign, even if Donald Trump, for example, finds an off ramp here from these tariffs. And I don't know that he will because I don't even know what that would look like.
Even if he does, he may have permanently damaged the reputation of the United States geopolitically and economically.
Yeah, if people don't want dollars, that will make the dollar less attractive, and so the dollar value falls.
Well, yeah, if they'll even have us.
I don't know. know. I don't know what your Wi-Fi signal will be like in federal detention.
Yeah, so that's definitely a risk. I don't know if we know yet how China's position has changed, but that's definitely a risk. And that's part of what I was talking about. Like people don't want any money in the United States and they may not want money in the United States because they think it's too risky.
Like I said, they may not want money in the United States because they want to retaliate, right? They want to draw... If China dumps its treasuries, it's not intuitive, but like... treasury prices go down and rates go up. And so when like Larry was talking before about an emerging market, that's sort of what he meant that it's like people don't want to buy that government's debt.
And so it becomes much more expensive for that government to borrow because like they have to offer an increasingly higher interest rate to attract investors. So Yeah, so China has a lot of leverage here. China doesn't own as much in the way of treasuries as it once did, or at least as like a share of all of the treasuries out there.
But they could be deciding, you know, this will be painful for Washington and that's why we'll do it. I don't know.
Sorry, this is like a much more technical discussion than I was expecting.
Fewer hot takes and more boring.
That's the correct intuition. And Trump is apparently about to find that out. Because again, he was not anticipating this. He had been bragging, I think even as recently as yesterday or the day before, he's like, see, we're getting interest rates go down. And it's like... look at the chart, chart not match words, which is quite a common phenomenon, obviously, for Donald Trump.
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