Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA via AP Images
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell speaks during a press conference after a Federal Open Market Committee meeting in Washington, September 20, 2023.
The Federal Reserve is at risk of getting itself and the economy into a doom loop where its own actions create the inflation that the Fed supposedly is trying to extinguish and serve to kill the recovery. Exhibit A is mortgage costs. Mortgage interest rates have risen to a 23-year high of 7.31 percent, according to a survey released by mortgage purchaser Freddie Mac.
And it isn’t just higher mortgage costs but more expensive car payments and credit card interest rates, as well as higher financing costs to homebuilders and small businesses. All of this increased inflation is the direct result of the Fed’s own policies.
Weirdly, higher interest rates are not counted in the Consumer Price Index. But they are certainly experienced as inflation by consumers and businesses.
In addition, there are extraneous sources of price inflation that have nothing whatever to do with the supposed macroeconomic overheating that the Fed’s tight money is intended to squelch. Exhibit A is the rising price of crude oil, now approaching $100 a barrel, up from around $75 a barrel as recently as July.
This shows up in higher consumer prices at the gas pump. But it’s not the result of increased motorist demand. It’s entirely the consequence of supply cuts by our enemy Vladimir Putin and our supposed new best friend, Saudi Arabia.
Exhibit B is the exorbitant prices charged by monopolists—that Biden’s all-of-government competition policies are challenging, including the two lawsuits by the Justice Department and the FTC against Google and Amazon. Again, this has nothing whatever to do with macroeconomic overheating.
But these price hikes will douse a still-fragile recovery and will contribute to a softer economy in an election year, which will harm Biden and the Democrats. And that increase in measured “inflation” will give the Fed more ammunition to perversely keep money tight, destroying the economy’s soft landing and promoting 1970s style stagflation.
Where higher oil prices are concerned, Putin would surely prefer his pal Trump to President Biden. But what about the Saudis, who are part of an improbable partnership with Israel that Biden is helping to broker. Trump would surely be a lot more indulgent of Netanyahu than Biden. And what about Fed Chair Jay Powell, a Trump appointee whom Biden foolishly reappointed?
There are enough variables in the coming election to make your head spin. But let’s not leave out the Fed, whose seats on the Board of Governors are now 4-to-3 Democrats; and Biden’s appointee Michael Barr, the vice chair for supervision, is increasingly a thorn in the side of Fed Chair Jay Powell.
Would Powell prefer Trump? He is certainly behaving that way.
