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Blame Powell, Not Putin
00:03:55
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| Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the weekly report. | |
| Blame Powell, not Putin or greedy corporations, for price hikes. | |
| The Biden administration and its allies continue to use Russian President Vladimir Putin as the convenient excuse for their economic failures. | |
| The most recent falsehood is that Russia's invasion of Ukraine caused March 8.5% year-over-year increase in the CPI. | |
| Prices were surging long before Russian troops entered Ukraine. | |
| Furthermore, Putin did not stop exporting food and gas. | |
| It was the Biden administration and Congress that imposed sanctions, making U.S. consumers suffer additional price increases. | |
| The blame for the economic effects lies with the U.S. government, not Russia. | |
| The United States has for years been meddling in Ukraine's affairs with the explicit goal of moving U.S. and NATO military forces ever closer to Russia. | |
| The most notorious example was the 2014 U.S. orchestrated coup that overthrew Ukraine's democratically elected government. | |
| Russia has a legitimate grievance over the U.S. supporting expanding NATO to include Ukraine, despite the U.S. having promised not to support expanding NATO beyond Germany's borders during their negotiations over how to end the Cold War. | |
| Foreign policy experts, including George Kennan, the architect of the Cold War containment strategy, warned that Russia would respond adversely to NATO expansion near Russia. | |
| Before the Ukraine conflict, Biden and his fellow Democrats blamed price increases on greedy corporations, going so far as to claim that increasing antitrust prosecutions would somehow bring down prices. | |
| Then Putin became the new excuse. | |
| The main culprit behind rising prices is neither Putin nor greedy corporations. | |
| Federal Reserve Board Chairman Powell and his colleagues are to blame. | |
| Starting in September 2019, when the Fed panicked over a spike in interest rates in the purchasing market that banks use to give each other overnight loans, the Fed has engaged in an unprecedented spree of money creation. | |
| The Fed further stepped up its easy money and low and even zero interest rate policy in response to the lockdowns. | |
| Increasing prices are the direct result of the Fed's policies. | |
| The Fed is planning to try to tame prices by increasing interest rates and reducing its balance sheet. | |
| This will likely tip the economy into recession. | |
| Increasing interest rates will also cause the federal government's debt payments to increase, which is a reason the Fed is not likely to increase rates to anywhere near where they would be in a free market. | |
| The best case scenario may be a return to 70-sided stagflation. | |
| The worst case scenario is that the Fed's failure to rein in inflation, fueled by Congress's failure to stop spending, combined with the continued resentment over the U.S. hyper-interventionist foreign policy, will cause a rejection of the dollar's reserve currency and lead to a major financial crisis. | |
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Crackdown on Liberties
00:00:12
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| Such a crisis would result in widespread poverty as well as violence, crackdown on liberties, and even the rise of a totalitarian government. | |