Stockman: "Trump peeled the bark off the Fed’s phony recovery narrative"

Most of the 90 minutes last night was a waste—with both candidates lobbing well-worn clichés, slogans and sound bites at the audience and each other.

But there was one brief moment that made it all worthwhile. That was when Donald Trump peeled the bark off the Fed’s phony recovery narrative and warned that the stupendous stock market bubble it has created will come crashing down the minute it stops pegging rates to the zero bound.

“……Typical politician. All talk, no action. Sounds good, doesn’t work. Never going to happen. Our country is suffering because people like Secretary Clinton have made such bad decisions in terms of our jobs and in terms of what’s going on. 

Now, look, we have the worst revival of an economy since the Great Depression. And believe me: We’re in a bubble right now. And the only thing that looks good is the stock market, but if you raise interest rates even a little bit, that’s going to come crashing down. 

We are in a big, fat, ugly bubble. And we better be awfully careful. And we have a Fed that’s doing political things. This Janet Yellen of the Fed. The Fed is doing political — by keeping the interest rates at this level. And believe me: The day Obama goes off, and he leaves, and goes out to the golf course for the rest of his life to play golf, when they raise interest rates, you’re going to see some very bad things happen, because the Fed is not doing their job. The Fed is being more political than Secretary Clinton.

Trump thereby landed a direct hit on the false Wall Street/Washington postulate that the Fed has been the nation’s economic savior. And he also elicited an almost instant defense of its destructive, anti-capitalist regime of Bubble Finance—-albeit in the guise of a “fact check” by the New York Times’ Fed reporter, Benyamin Appelbaum.

To be sure, there were actually no “facts” to check in Trump’ statement. It was simply an entirely correct judgment that the utterly unnatural interest rates engineered by the Fed have fueled an egregious inflation of financial asset prices and that “some very bad things” are going to happen when the Fed’s market rigging operation is finally halted.

Still, and opinion or not, Appelbaum emitted a barrage of harrumphing and scolding, implying that Trump is some kind of yokel who does not understand the sacred independence of the Fed:

In attacking the Fed, Mr. Trump is plowing across a line that presidential candidates and presidents have observed for the past several decades. There has been a bipartisan consensus that central banks operate most effectively when they are shielded from short-term political pressures. Indeed, President Richard M. Nixon’s insistence that the Fed should not raise rates in the early 1970s played a role in unleashing a long era of inflation — and in convincing his successors that it was better to leave the Fed to its technocratic devices.

Technocratic devices? Now that is downright balderdash because what the Fed is doing is profoundly and resoundingly political.

Read the rest of the article.