Inflation is still out of control, and the Biden administration is raising interest rates to fight it. But is this the smartest move right now? Mike Papantonio is joined by attorney Michael Bixby to discuss.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: Inflation is outta control and the Biden administration is raising interest rates to fight it. But is that the smartest move? Right now to join me I have Michael Bixby, the fire breathing progressive standing in for Farron Cousins this week. Michael, as I look at this case, you have all of the talking heads all over the place about the fact that the Fed should do this and Fed should do that. But there are, there are some, some, some pretty important points that they’re making about raising interest rates and how it’s potentially gonna bring on a recession.
Michael Bixby: No, that’s exactly right. So that’s exactly what they’re talking about is the natural reaction to this of, oh, we’ve gotta keep the prices down and you notice what some of the Fed is saying, oh, we actually wanna really bring wages down.
Mike Papantonio: Right.
Michael Bixby: Is part of, part of what the goal is to be accomplished here. And absolutely there’s a real risk. In fact, it’s the consensus that if the Fed keeps this up, that what you’re gonna get is, is at, at best some sort of a, maybe if it’s not a full blown recession, you are gonna have some contraction. So you’re talking about something that’s obviously gonna have negative effects.
Mike Papantonio: The problem with recession, as you know, is most of the time we don’t even see it until it’s almost over. And what I, I thought was so remarkable is Yellen telling, you know, Janet Yellen coming out and saying, well, there’s a couple things I didn’t see coming. I, I didn’t see the potential for a recession and I didn’t see inflation. What scares the hell outta me about that is that’s her job. And she, it was almost as if she said the whole administration was at sleep. They, they were asleep on this issue.
Michael Bixby: And, and if you think about that, Pap, I mean, this is complicated and I, I don’t wanna say oversimplify it.
Mike Papantonio: Right.
Michael Bixby: But at the same time, some of this is fairly elementary. I mean, what happened in 2020 and 2021, we printed trillions of dollars. The natural effect of that of saying, well, what is the likely cause of this going to be? Is that going to cause inflation or deflation? I mean, if you ask it on a very elementary side, it’s like, well, that’s much more likely to cause inflation. And there’s a lot of com, complicated effects of that. I appreciate that, but you’re right. We have the best minds or supposedly the best minds who should be looking out for this and saying, how are we going to manage?
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. How do you say you never saw it coming? Okay. It was like, we heard the same thing about the economic crash with the mortgages. Never saw it coming. And you ask yourself, well, my God who, you know, who’s, who’s at the wheel? And it doesn’t seem to make any difference when we’re talking to these economists, because they, they didn’t see either the crash coming. They don’t see the, they didn’t see this coming. They didn’t see inflation coming. They didn’t see potential for a recession coming. They don’t talk about what you talked about is that the end result is to lower wages and potentially put millions of people outta jobs as this progresses.
Michael Bixby: Right. And you, you want to say, how is if you bury your head in the sand, you can miss a lot of stuff.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Michael Bixby: If you, if you choose to ignore it. But the ultimate consequence here, it’s gonna not, it’s not gonna affect the people at the top. The people who didn’t see it. And what you’re gonna see is the most damage is gonna happen on the bottom end. It’s gonna happen for the lower wage workers already, who are gonna be harmed.
Mike Papantonio: Right. Gated communities are not gonna feel this.
Michael Bixby: Correct.
