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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
All of that adds costs and limits competition.
So once again, you have to think about the circumstances in terms of things that were once pushing inflation in one direction are no longer there and may even be pushing in the other direction.
That's right.
So the initial rise in inflation in the 1960s was essentially an economic phenomenon, an economy that was running too hot, and that just basically erupted.
But the reason it kept going up through the 1970s and early 1980s was because of repeated errors by the Federal Reserve, whose primary job is to keep inflation low.
Those errors were partly errors of judgment.
They thought that the unemployment rate could be lower on a sustained basis than it really could be, given the demographics of the country.
So they kept trying to force the economy to grow faster than it was really capable of.
But the second was political.
Both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were very, very
interested in making sure the Fed did not get in the way of their own political agenda.
And that meant that even if inflation pressures were bubbling up, they did not want the Fed clamping down and causing a recession.
Both William McChesney Martin Jr., who was chairman up until 1970, and Arthur Burns, who was a chairman after that, succumbed here and there to that pressure from their presidents in the sense that they did not respond as forcefully as they perhaps would have preferred to these inflation pressures.
Now, let's bring that up to the present.
Donald Trump obviously likes to boast about how high the stock market is.
Well, if the Fed decides to take a hammer to inflation, that won't be good for the stock market.
Will Trump start putting pressure on the Fed?
Well, I wouldn't be surprised if he sends a few nasty tweets at the Fed, but I don't think the people who are running the Fed, including Jerome Powell, the new chairman, are the sorts of people to basically roll over and do whatever the president wants.
There's a strong tradition at the Fed, indeed all central banks, not just of maintaining their independence, but using that independence to do the right thing
on inflation, and they have a 2% inflation target.
Showing 381–400 of 528 · page 20 of 27
← Previous
Next →