I listened to the J-Pow speech and question and answer today in Rhode Island.
Orange Turd will be unhappy. In the question and answer, he emphasized that the Fed is not political, and does not make decisions to help or hurt any sides’ political positions. He used different verbiage, but he said that people who attacked the Fed for political reasons are stupid dip-shits.
Basically, he said there’s just as much risk from inflation as there is from a slowing economy. He says in this environment, there’s nothing the Fed can do that does not have a risk - because there is risk coming from both the need not to have the economy weaken unnecessarily and the need not to provoke an increase in inflation unnecessarily. The Fed is between a rock and a hard place.
On the same drive, before the Powell speech, a Bloomberg analyst was saying the biggest problem right now is not tariffs per se, or immigration policy, but that nobody in business has any idea what to do because everything the administration is doing is challenged in court or up to TFG‘s day-to-day whims. He said that business is fine no matter what happens, as they can plan to deal with the current world realities. But as it stands, business can’t take a position or invest money (say - on building a plant in America to avoid tariffs) if three months from now the Supreme Court says that Trump had no authority to implement the tariffs in the first place.
Essentially, Trump has kneecapped the world‘s economy through a combination of uncertainty, child-like hubris resulting in changed positions that are not related to actual trade imbalances, and TACO walk backs.
The Narcissist in Chief wants everyone to look at him and hang on his every word. They are. The problem is, everyone listening to him inexorably leads to them saying, “Shit, who knows what’s going to happen. Let’s just sit and wait. no need to hire right now and no need to build.”