Jan. 2, 2024 - The Tucker Carlson Show
04:08
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| About three weeks ago, Jay Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, announced that it was, quote, premature to conclude with confidence that we have achieved a sufficiently restrictive stance or to speculate on when policy might ease. | ||
| That's Fed speak, and in case you're not familiar with it, that means we plan to keep interest rates high. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Then last week, two weeks later, with no warning at all, Jay Powell seemed to pivot dramatically. | ||
| Let's say almost the opposite. | ||
| Actually, he said, cutting interest rates is something that, quote, begins to come into view and is clearly a topic of discussion out in the world and also a discussion for us at our meeting today. | ||
| In other words, we are lowering rates. | ||
| So many people who are paying attention concluded that this was political. | ||
| Joe Biden is losing the race and the Fed is trying to save him. | ||
| But what is even worse than that? | ||
| What if it's not just Joe Biden they're trying to save, but the U.S. economy? | ||
| What if the fundamentals are so weak underneath that the Fed is desperately scrambling, groping in the dark to figure out what to do? | ||
| You have to think that's possible. | ||
| The Fed is supposed to be stable. | ||
| That's why they speak like 19th century jurists, to convey stability. | ||
| But if they're changing their mind and the biggest question that they address in two weeks, one direction, another direction, That suggests chaos. | ||
| And that's bad. | ||
|
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The world has fundamentally changed because of the zero interest rate policy. | |
| You know, we have all this debt. | ||
| It was made possible by zero interest rates. | ||
| And in the past, decade after decade, when you had low unemployment, you had low deficits. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| When there's low unemployment, you don't have to pay so much unemployment benefits. | ||
| You have higher tax receipts because more people are employed. | ||
| But starting in 2015, something changed. | ||
| We've had low unemployment since 2015, and yet the deficit has been rising since 2015. This is unprecedented to have a rising deficit. | ||
| With what's considered to be close to full employment. | ||
| So we have a debt-based economic scheme. | ||
| The deficit is a percent of GDP is running at above 6%. | ||
| People talk about this is a good economy, but if we actually didn't run a budget deficit, if we had a balanced budget, GDP would be negative over the last 12 months. | ||
| And so this is the fundamental problem. | ||
| And I think that's factoring somewhat into the Fed's logic, but it's not tenable. | ||
| We cannot keep going on. | ||
| With this deficit-based scheme. | ||
| I think people are starting to understand that. | ||
| It's amazing how many things have so fundamentally changed. | ||
| You know, when I was in college, there was this Greenpeace movement and their motto was save the whales. | ||
| And now the environmentalist movement is killing the whales with windmill construction in the ocean. | ||
| You know, when I was in college, I went to Dartmouth College near the Vermont-New Hampshire border. | ||
| It's in New Hampshire. | ||
| There were a lot of sort of hippie types that had bumper stickers that said, split wood, not atoms. | ||
| And now what are we doing? | ||
| We're saying zero carbon. | ||
| We're now saying anything but split wood, anything but burn coal. | ||
| So everything changes. | ||
| You know, the women's movement was a big deal back in the 70s. | ||
| Women's right. | ||
| Equal opportunity. | ||
| Now it's the opposite of that. | ||
| Now it's women's, at least in athletics, women are under attack. | ||
| So it's weird how everything changes, but that's the way society and long-term economic cycles work, is that things that were norms in the past become outdated as societal... | ||
| Conditions change, attitudes change, the means of production change, and those norms just can't hold up. | ||
| And we're in one of those radical transformations. | ||
| Of course, we see that in the political spectrum, where, you know, everyone thought the 2016 election was wacky, and then the 2020 election turned out to be wackier. | ||
| And I think everybody can sense that the 2024 election is going to be the wackiest of our lifetime. |
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