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Powell's Peril
00:04:25
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| Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the weekly report, America's Most Dangerous Unknown Man. | |
| The U.S. Senate will soon vote on Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell's nomination to a second term. | |
| One of the senators opposing Powell is Elizabeth Warren. | |
| I don't often agree with Senator Warren, but I do agree with her assessment that Powell is dangerous. | |
| However, Warren actually doesn't understand what makes Powell or any Fed chairman intrinsically dangerous to liberty and prosperity. | |
| Warren thinks Powell is dangerous because she thinks he will not be supportive enough of imposing her desired new regulations on banks and other financial institutions. | |
| Senator Warren, like most progressives, clings to a fantastical notion that regulations benefit workers, consumers, and small businesses. | |
| The truth is, most regulations benefit large corporations by imposing costs that big businesses can easily absorb, but that their smaller competitors cannot. | |
| Powell is a threat to the American people. | |
| Under his tenure, the Fed has kept interest rates at or near zero. | |
| The Fed's balance sheet has grown to over $8 trillion. | |
| This has caused prices to climb at a rate America has not seen in several decades. | |
| At his nomination hearings before the Senate Banking Committee, Powell reiterated the Fed's intention to fight inflation by reducing its monthly $120 billion purchase of treasuries and mortgage-backed securities. | |
| Powell also stated that the Fed is planning to increase interest rates this year. | |
| However, even if the Fed follows through on this, interest rates will remain at historically low levels. | |
| Powell, like Elizabeth Warren and other progressives, dangerously believes that the Fed should go woke. | |
| However, Powell is still not woke enough for progressives who lobbied President Joe Biden to replace Powell with Fed Board Chairman Brainerd, the biggest supporter of Elizabeth Warren-style regulations on the Fed board. | |
| Brainerd is more committed than Powell to using monetary and regulatory policies to advance the woke agenda. | |
| President Biden did end up nominating Brainerd to become vice chairman at the Fed. | |
| A Powell-Brainerd Fed would likely use social and climate justice as a justification for expanding the Fed's easy money policy. | |
| President Biden has recently nominated Sarah Raskin to the Fed board, who also has advocated for the Fed to use its power to fight climate change. | |
| A central bank committed to the social justice and climate change agendas will inevitably increase the Fed's inflation tax. | |
| Contrary to the claims of some progressives, lower-income Americans are primary victims of this hidden and regressive tax. | |
| Powell prefers to pour his rather zealous and extremist philosophy behind the scenes. | |
| Thus, not surprisingly, he is a leading opponent of Audit the Fed. | |
| Powell claims that bringing transparency to the Fed's conduct of monetary policy would somehow jeopardize the Fed's independence. | |
| Powell's claim is truly fake. | |
| There is nothing in the Audit the Fed bill giving the Congress or the executive branch any new power over monetary policy. | |
| Any group of individuals given the power to manipulate the money supply and manipulate the interest rates that are the price of money poses a threat to our liberty and prosperity. | |
| The solution is not to replace Powell with a better Fed chairman or to force the Fed to follow a rule that still allows it to erode the dollar's value. | |
| The only way to protect the people from dangerous individuals like Jerome Powell and the rest of the Fed board is to audit and then end the Fed. | |