Inflation and the Confused Biden Administration
They’re even wrong about being wrong about inflation!
What a bunch we have running fiscal policy in our country. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has distinguished herself for being wrong about inflation and virtually everything else. And President Biden, well there’s no need to describe his abject confusion anymore. Since everyone except a few shameless toadies in the media can see it, that would be beating a dead horse.
But their public positions are both utterly incoherent and incompatible. When fiscal policy is this contradictory, it is time to seek refuge in gold and silver!
Yellen’s cluelessness and apologies for not understanding inflation are the stuff of legend. But there is more, so much more…
Her support for a wealth tax, a tax not on income but on property people own, a tax on unrealized capital gains that would even require people to sell family businesses to pay, would have Karl Marx dance a commie jig!
Equally destructive was her support for the administration’s crazy desire to have banks report people’s every transaction of $600 or more. Imagine how utterly mentally vacant she must be to not have envisaged how much strangling bureaucracy that would have created. Inconceivable!
Her failure to have the Treasury issue long-dated bonds before the Fed began raising rates is just one more component of our debt disaster. Stanley Druckenmiller calls this “the worst mistake in the history of the Treasury.”
Then there is her assertion that the US can afford two wars at once. “Absolutely!” she says. That was eight months ago when the national debt was $33.56 trillion. Today it is $34.68 trillion. Up well over a trillion dollars in eight months!
As for Biden, just as he wanders, squats, and mutters aimlessly at photo shoots, shadowed by handlers trying to cover for him, he bats about for something to say about inflation until he comes up with something his handlers prepared for him. Bill Bonner describes him similarly: “Biden, the man, is just a cut-out… a place-holder. We’ve never heard an original thought pass his lips, nor an insight worth remembering. Instead, his pensée is just much-rehearsed blah-blah, sticking with whatever talking points his handlers suggest.”
So, what has his people had him saying about inflation? Greed, of course.
But greed has always been with us. If greedy corporations are responsible for inflation, if they have the power to unilaterally raise prices, why wasn’t inflation out of control before Biden? (Note that Washington never blames inflation on government greed! It never points to all the money it shovels to its cronies and its favored interest groups. It is never, ever about their greed).
But in any case, Biden and Yellen are not even able to keep their stories straight! The other day on CNBC Yellen contradicted Biden’s attribution of inflation to corporate greed. “I think that inflation is about supply and demand,” she said.
Well, of course, all prices are about supply and demand. When the government prints trillions of dollars out of thin air and distributes them to its friends, they increases demand. Same amount of goods and services in the economy, but suddenly some people have a lot more printed money with which they buy things. It’s like an auction: they are bidding prices higher and higher.
The cluelessness is not limited to just Biden and Yellen. It is systemic in the administration and, frankly, in both parties and throughout Washington and the governing classes. Take for example the cluelessness of Jared Bernstein, the president’s chief economic advisor, about how monetary policy works. See for yourself:
The ship of state is being run by the intellectually deficient. It is a ship of fools. They are incapable of steering us out of a currency storm. They will destroy the dollar and leave your prosperity wrecked upon the reefs.
The need to own gold is growing more critical by the day. Because something will happen!