Saturday, January 27, 2018

Holding My Nose and Forming an Alliance with Elizabeth "Pocahontas" Warren



This is how you form an alliance, not by necessarily supporting an individual but supporting a position an individual holds that aligns with your own.

Up until now, I can't think of any issue that Senator Elizabeth Warren has held that I could support. But now one has emerged.

She is absolutely dead set against the confirmation of  Marvin Goodfriend to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. I am completely in sync with this position, though we both hold different reasons why the Goodfriend confirmation should be derailed.

During his recent confirmation hearing by the Senate banking committee, Warren took him to task for calling on the Fed to tighten monetary policy when the unemployment rate was still as high as 7%.

"I’m concerned because these wrong predictions are not outliers for you — they have been part of your overall approach to monetary policy which effectively ignores the Fed’s full employment mandate and instead focuses solely on speculative concerns about inflation," Warren said.

"Based on the kind of judgment that you have demonstrated, American families are very lucky that you weren’t on the Fed board over the past several years and I think it would be a mistake to put you on the Fed board now," she said.

I don't believe the Fed should be manipulating interest rates at all, so I disagree with Warren on that point but, still, Goodfriend should be stopped.

He is in favor of negative interest rates. That is, he believes the money in your checking account should be taxed forcing you to spend it to create Keynesian-type stimulus during a recession.

This is absolute nonsense, during a recession the more savings that are held, the quicker the economy recovers from a recession.

Negative interest rates will promote the opposite, They are one of the most evil economic policies that could be advocated by a government official. It's taking money from people when they are trying to build up a cash reserve during difficult times.

Maybe Warren can get something done here. The Wall Street Journal reported on Goodfriend's hearing:
Mr. Goodfriend on Tuesday faced much tougher questioning from committee Democrats than Mr. Trump’s first two nominees to the Fed board... Mr. Goodfriend didn’t appear to win over any of the panel’s Democrats, suggesting his path to Senate confirmation could be more difficult.
 -RW

3 comments:

  1. Warren's opposition must be rooted in that it is a Trump appointment or that one instance. I doubt she has any principled opposition to negative interest rates.

    Negative interest rates are to force us all into the condition our "betters" want, one where we all live paycheck to paycheck. Hand to mouth. That way we are always in need of the next check or we'll quickly spiral into homelessness. Especially when combined with a rental economy for just about everything. This is exactly what people like Warren want to progress us to.

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  2. She did her personal grandstanding for the shill 'American People"......next will be the rubber stamp as usual.

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  3. Yes, and while the costs of everything continue to go up and purchasing power of the shit dollar continues to spiral downward. And those with excess cash find only speculation in the equity markets as a way to keep up. And the majority get increasingly oppressed by the thumb of the State behind all this, and their evil web of control.

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