To the ire of seemingly everyone, the Federal Reserve announced yet another rate hike today, bringing up the federal-funds rate by a quarter of a percent, to 2.25 to 2.5 percent.
The S&P plummeted. The Dow too. The president is pissed. Apparently no one from Wall Street to the White House is happy with the decision.
But the Fed made the right call. Every time the Fed raises interest rates, critics correctly question whether we ought to have a central bank in the first place. But so long as we have one and the economy isn’t in a recession, the Fed has a responsibility to ward off economic overheating and the emergence of bubbles with rate hikes.
The Fed undeniably kept interest rates far too low in the decade after the Great Recession. Artificially low interest rates impede the invisible hand of investment markets, encouraging malinvestments and eventually the complete formation of financial bubbles waiting to burst. In the ’90s, it was tech. In the 2000s, it was housing.
Before 2020, it could be leveraged loan debt and housing yet again.
People telling you that Chairman Jerome Powell is an agent of the Deep State seeking to undermine the White House are lying to you, and they are doing so maliciously. The fact is that our trade war is killing investment, costing Americans, and inflating (not shrinking) our trade deficit to record highs. It’s intellectually honest to advocate for a trade war as a means to an end while acknowledging that it comes with immediate costs. But to perpetuate the lie that trade wars — in and of themselves, not as a means to an end — are good and easy to win, is either moronic or evil.
President Trump picked Powell after stiffing predecessor Janet Yellen, who wished to be renominated to the top job. Powell is a lifelong Republican and considerably dovish on monetary policy when compared to his peers. The idea that Powell would court Trump for the job only to try and see the economy under his watch fail is preposterous and defies any sane logic.
The fact is that the Fed during the Obama administration was far too dovish, keeping interest rates too low for too long. Had another recession arisen, there would have been no monetary buffer to fuel the economy. Powell is right to raise rates now while he can, and Trump should be thankful.
