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All right, first up tonight, score one for the Doves. You've heard warnings about inflation for what feels like forever. You've heard them from politicians. You've heard them from the ads telling you to buy gold. You've even heard my own Mia Culpa because there hasn't happened in any inflation. Turns out that Janet Yellen and other inflation doubves on the Fed had it right.
Important new Wall Street Journal study shows that Yellen and New York Fed head William Dudley were the best forecasters for the past four years. And inflation hawks like James Bullard, Charles Pler, and Jeffrey Lacker, they were wrong. They had the worst forecasting records. All right. So, one question is, does this strengthen Yellen's case to be the next Fed share?
Let's ask Peter Schiff. He's the CEO of Europacific Capital. And we go to Scott Sumner. We welcome him to the show for the first time. He's professor of economics at Bentley University. And Professor Sumner is the leader of the new market monitorist school. Scott Sar, I want to begin with you because everyone was talking about the printing press money, the $3 trillion dollars plus that the Fed injected uh into its balance sheet and presumably into the financial markets, but the inflation never showed up.
Why, Scott, in your judgment, why did the printing press money not show up? Well, that's basically because when interest rates fall close to zero, you can put a lot of money into the system and it doesn't have much inflationary effect. Um, this is especially true because they started paying interest on reserves back in October 2008.
That further encouraged banks to hold on to the money. So, historically, when countries get near zero interest rates, inflation generally stays low despite a lot of money injection. How far can they go, Scott? I I want to get I want to get Peter Schiff in this, but how far can they go? I mean, would you advocate that the Fed continue quantitative easing and bond buying uh in order to expand the economy?
Yes, sorry. Yes, I would. Um I think that's a good policy, but an even better policy would be to set some explicit target for say nominal GDP growth and use that as a way to sort of steer monetary policy. But QE is better than nothing. All right, Peter Schiff, QE is better than nothing. The inflation never panned out.
Janet Yellen wins the forecasting prize. I gave a maya culpa I don't know six or eight months ago and said guess what there is no inflation at least as reported. What's your take on this Peter? Because the inflation story never panned out. Well, I'm still waiting for your next miaulpa. Maybe the only reason she hit the dart board is because somebody moved the board in the path of her dart.
You know, if we we when the Fed monetized $3 trillion worth of mortgages and treasuries, by definition, that is inflation. Quantitative easing is just a eupheanism for inflation. We're talking about the effect of inflation when we talk about rising prices. We already have rising real estate prices. We have rising stock prices.
Inflation has caused that. But I believe consumer prices are also rising much faster than the government admits. We're hiding behind these CPI numbers which have been reverse engineered to come up with a low number. But if you actually look at what's happening to consumer prices, not what the government tells you is happening, but what is actually happening, prices are rising a lot faster.
And so Yelen is wrong. There is inflation and it's going to get even worse. And part of the reason that we're not feeling it is that we're exporting a lot of it. We send countries like China our paper money and they send us their goods and so money flows out and goods come in and that temporarily keeps a lid on prices that are already rising faster than the government admits.
But pretty soon those flows are going to reverse and our money is going to come back and prices go through the roof. Scott Sar, I I don't see what's wrong with that. All that is just a bunch of free trade with China. And again, Scott, I I go to you. All right. You heard Peter Shiff say there is inflation.
We just don't see the inflation. All right. How does a market how does a market monitorist react to that? That's just not right. Even if you look at private estimates like the billion prices project which looks at internet prices, they get roughly the same estimate of the CPI. And also if it were really true that inflation was a lot higher, say four 6%.
That would mean real GDP growth would be that much lower zero or negative -2 and that would totally conflict with the employment numbers and everything else. So there's no way there could be a conspiracy to change the inflation numbers without throwing everything else off course. You know, it's actually the reverse.
If I'm right, then the economy has been in a recession for the entirety of the Obama presidency. And that makes a lot more sense to me. The reason it feels like a recession to so many people is because it is. The labor force is contracting. We're we're losing using a lot less energy now than we were years ago when the economy was supposedly smaller.
And I I think that the reason we're using less energy, the reason that the labor force is shrinking is because the economy is shrinking. It's just that we can't see how much it's shrink shrinking because we're measuring it uh with with a with with a with a bad ruler because the GDP deflator is too low.
Well, I don't know the PC. Go ahead, Scott. I'm sorry. the the job we were we're gaining two million jobs a year the last few years. There's no way that's consistent with falling real GDP. Scott, let me ask you something. You're creating part-time jobs. Let me let me ask we're losing real jobs from this flippers.
Uh Peter, you're going off on a tangent. I want to stay on the matter at hand. Why didn't quantitative easing create inflation? You're doing everything but talking about the question directly. So, let me go to Scott Sler. Three more traditionalist monitoriist economists. Charles Plauer of the Philadelphia Fed, Jeffrey Lacker of the Richmond Fed, and James Bullard of the St.
Louis Fed. They predicted time and time again a higher inflation rate. Scott, what did they miss from your standpoint? Why were they wrong? Well, I think they were focusing too much on the quantitative easing, which during normal times would be very inflationary. But in the special situation where the interest rates are near zero, that money just basically sits in the banking system.
And it it had a little effect on the economy, but uh nowhere near as much as they predicted. And and Bullard, to his credit, has really changed his tune and actually advocated more aggressive monetary stimulus because he's seen the inflation numbers come in lower than he expected. Would you like to see the Fed continue its quantitative easing or would you like to see the Fed slow down?
Scott Sumner. Well, I I'd prefer they do nominal GDP targeting. That'd be more effective. Uh if they don't do that, Kiwi is better than nothing. It's basically the difference between our weak recovery and Europe's double dip recession. That look at the Europe situation. Look at the US. That's what QE has done.
Go ahead, Peter. It's not better than nothing. We all it's given us is a phony expansion. They have to stop it. And as soon as they do, we're gonna have the recession that we that we should have had years ago. But the Fed shortcircuited it. Quantitative easing is inflation. That's what it is. And we're going to see the consequences.
Those Fed governors that were warning about the ill effects of quantitative easing are right. And you're going to see it in consumer prices. Most people already see it because they're going shopping. But maybe the guys at the Federal Reserve or people on Wall Street want to pretend it doesn't exist.
But it's there. And it's going to keep getting worse because we're not doing anything about it. Peter, what happens when the Fed slows down? Its quantitative easing, starts buying fewer bonds. Yeah. Well, then the phony recovery implodes. The housing market goes down. We're back in an official recession.
I think some of the big banks might be under a lot of pressure again. Some of them might fail. And I think the US government is going to have a hard time paying the interest on the national debt, let alone retiring any of the principal. We might have to restructure that debt because the only reason that we can pretend that we can afford to pay the money back is because interest rates are practically zero and the Fed is the big buyer.
But if the Fed isn't there anymore and interest rates go up, we don't have the tax base to service that debt. Scott, what's your reaction to what Peter just said? Are we going to go bust because of the interest rate hikes? No. Uh I don't think interest rates will go up very much even if the Fed stops buying bonds.
In fact, if the economy weakens, historically interest rates tend to fall during those periods. Uh Europe tried raising rates a few years ago. The economy weakened, they went right back down to almost zero. So I I don't see But what if the dollar weakens and inflation flares up? Who's going to buy those bonds?
Well, if inflation really flares up, which I don't expect, that would be consistent with much faster nominal GDP growth and the government's budget deficit will get much smaller in that case. What about cash? What if it what if it's stagflation like the 70 is only worse? What if we have inflation and the economy contracts and interest rates rise?
Then what happens? Well, obviously that could be a problem, but the Fed has no control over stagflation. That's from the supply side of the economy. Last question, Scott. Senator. Well, you know, the supply side of the economy is not doing too well with all these taxes and regulations that are hamstringing.
All right. That I agree with. Well, that I agree on. That I agree. We all agree with that. Okay. Good for you.
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