Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Janet Yellan warns inflation decline may not be "smooth"




Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen Interview release today. 


 

"Once rents cycle through, inflation will come down more"... "it take awhile for that to filter into the Consumer Price Index ('CPI'). 

Later in the interview, she said "I wouldn't expect this to be a  smooth path month to month, but the trend is clearly favorable". 

WEITZ: Let me interpret this... "(commercial) rents are falling, thus our current 'Consumer Price Index' / CPI numbers are crap. We are actually in more of a deflationary/ stagflation environment...but we are hiding the ball from the American public for whatever reason". 

I hate to say this, but I have zero faith in our current leaders to navigate what I believe is coming our way. 

In the later 2000s during the last major economic crisis, we had Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson at the helm of Federal Reserve and Treasury respectively. Bernanke was a Princeton scholar on the Great Depression and Paulson was the former CEO of Goldman Sachs and carried a lot of weight on Wall Street. While I'd argue the bank bailouts benefitted the culpable parties and were thus were BS in some ways, that was the act of Congress and Obama at the time to not put guardrails on the use of the bailout funds.... Nevertheless, those two unequivocally saved us from a awful financial situation with collateral banking damage that likely would have mirrored a great depression like situation. I'm not so sure I have the same confidence in Mr. Powell or Ms. Yellen to navigate the ship if the 'waters get choppy'. 

Lets be frank - we have a debt based monetary system that can't withstand interest rates this high so if we are monitoring it based on crap CPI numbers, their analysis is equally crap and they will keep rates too high for too long.


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