Greg Ip
speaker
528 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2018
last heard Sep 2024
Greg Ip’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It's very difficult for a president to affect the inflation rate very much.
And that's because the inflation rate is really the function of these two gigantic macroeconomic forces, supply and demand.
And presidents have very little influence on either of those things, except in emergencies or unusual circumstances like we had a few years ago.
And when it comes to inflation, the single most important actor isn't the president at all.
It's the Federal Reserve.
And the Federal Reserve, under most parties and most presidents, has committed itself to keeping inflation down around 2%.
His most direct proposal is to essentially stimulate drilling for oil and gas in the United States.
We will drill, baby, drill, drill.
The US is right now the world's number one oil producer, one of the very largest natural gas producers.
And since some of that oil and gas comes out of land that is basically controlled by the federal government, it's like in the offshore continental shelf, the Gulf of Mexico, where it's on federal land.
In theory, the federal government can increase or decrease the supply of land available for drilling.
But those things take a long time to take effect.
You're talking about years between when land becomes available and when an oil well might actually start to generate oil.
And more to the point, the inclination of an American company to produce more oil in the United States is mostly a function of the price of oil on world markets.
You kind of need oil prices and gasoline prices to go up to get a lot of US production.
And when those prices go down, you tend to have less US production.
So there is only very limited effect that the president can have on inflation through oil and gas policy.
That's right, yes.
To save the economy, first we must destroy it.
So first of all, Trump inherited a very strong economy from Barack Obama.
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