The 2024 Candidates VS the Fed
Jeff is joined by a panel of experts who dive into the 2024 Presidential Candidate’s opinions on the Fed and Monetary Policy. Comic Dave Smith joins to give his opinion on RFK, Vivek, and more!
Connect with Jeff and Monetary Metals on Twitter: @JeffDeist @Monetary_Metals
Additional Resources
The Case for Gold Yield in Investment Portfolios
Podcast Chapters
[00:00:01]: Debased
[00:01:15]: Ron Paul’s influence on discussing the Fed
[00:04:57]: Shift in focus from the economy to other issues
[00:07:05]: Biden’s potential impact on monetary policy
[00:11:23]: Potential scapegoating of Jerome Powell by the left
[00:15:13]: Trump’s understanding of monetary policy
[00:18:33]: Judy Shelton’s treatment by economists
[00:21:29]: Potential candidates and their views on Bitcoin
[00:24:26]: RFK Jr.’s legitimacy and changing views
[00:28:36]: The importance of tapping into the Bitcoin wing
[00:30:30]: Vivek Ramaswamy’s thoughts on monetary policy
[00:32:34]: DeSantis’ knowledge of monetary policy
[00:43:18]: Value of RFK and Trump
[00:44:34]: Difficulty of Replacing Biden with Newsom
[00:53:10]: Opportunity to Use Monetary Policy as a Populist Wedge Issue
[00:57:17]: Make Sure to Subscribe
Transcript:
Jeff Deist:
Welcome to Debased, a show about the current state of money with Jeff Dice. Hey, good afternoon, everybody. Happy Friday. Everybody listening, this is Jeff Dice from Monetary Metals. Another Friday afternoon, 2 PM Eastern Twitter Space talking this week on the heels of our discussion last week about the possible 2024 candidates and what their views might be on monetary policy and the Fed. So we’re going to be joined by some friends. I know that Stephen Le Verra, I think, is going to attempt to join us. David Wah from Coinbits. Peter St. Annes from Heritage. J ordan Shacktel from the Dossier. Substack, I think, will be joining us. At the end of last week’s space. This topic came up a bit, what we might be looking for down the road. So I just wanted to queue things up a little bit. And this says people who care about monetary policy, people who care about money, people who follow Fintw it, admittedly somewhat autistic bunch. But especially when you throw in the libertarian, Austrian end of things, we tend to get pretty exercised by monetary policy and think about it, talk about it, read about it. A lot more than normally army’s do.
Jeff Deist:
It’s just the nature of the beast. And so really going all the way back to the Ron Paul days, the 2008 Ron Paul campaign, that was basically in the teeth of the global financial crisis, which was unfolding that fall. And Ron in Congress, had had some back and forth with Ben Bernanke famously talking about what is money. And so against all odds, Ron managed to make the Fed an issue in both his 2008 and 2012 campaigns. And this was really unusual because if you go back and look at presidential campaigns, heck, even if you look at them today, they really don’t talk about the Fed much amongst professional economists, academic economists, monetary policy was always considered a backwater. And we talked about Alan Greenspan being the maistro and these brilliant technocrats. And it was just something that these monetary policy guys, these economists ran off to the side. But it wasn’t really for public consumption. It wasn’t a campaign issue, all this and that. So 2008 comes along. We’d already had some tremors with the 2000, 2001 tech stock bubble. Then we have a housing bubble in 2008. We have the layman Brothers collapse. We have a banking fall out of banking crisis.
Jeff Deist:
It becomes the everything bubble. And all of a sudden, far more normy types, not just in America, but across the West, are starting to think about and talk about monetary policy. And of course, most of us on this call would probably like them to think about it, maybe in broader terms, not just as like the way we think of fiscal policy, the way we think of it, but in a broader, like a civilizational and cultural element. And I think Bitcoiners, to their credit, have done a great job of tying so many ills in society to fiat money. And the meme is Bitcoin fixes this. But it’s really true. There are an awful lot of things beyond just what we think of as the state of the economy. There’s an awful lot of things which are affected by monetary policy, which we don’t much think about or talk about. Everything from family formation, you name it, what food we eat, what art we enjoy, what buildings we build. I mean, a lot of this has to do at the end of the day with.
Peter St Onge:
The.
Jeff Deist:
Carrot and the stick, the incentives, interest rates, the possibility of borrowing money. So it’s an interesting thing to think about. And of course, we worry that most Americans don’t much think about it. Supposedly, the economy is always the old picture. That’s what James Carville said back in the 90s when he was working for Bill Clinton. He famously said, It’s the economy stupid. I’m not so sure that that’s true anymore. My God, if you look at the news just the last 24 hours, all we’re talking about is this Supreme Court affirmative action case, for example. We’re constantly talking about trans and guns and all issues. And against all odds, Joe Biden and his party underneath him managed to prevail or at least hold their own in the 22 midterm elections, which had they been purely a referendum on the economy, I think just by virtue of being the opposition party, the Republicans should have picked up lots and lots of seats, and they didn’t do that. So maybe we’ve reached this point where America and Americans have just decided, Well, we peaked and we’re not necessarily the greatest country on earth anymore, but things are still pretty good here.
Jeff Deist:
And the economy just muddles along. And yes, there’s better times. But still, what I care about is defeating woke, or what I care about is defeating MAGA. I mean, it feels like that. It feels like that. But maybe it just feels that way to people like me who spend too much time on Twitter. But one bright spot, I think, is that some of the announced candidates for 2024 have actually brought up monetary policy. People like RFK Jr. Vivek Ramaswamy, Santist, others have begun to talk about it as an issue. So I think that’s promising. The under 40s, especially the under 30s in this country, man, oh, man, not only are they facing unbelievable housing prices and college tuition prices and health care prices, especially after COVID, but then car prices, $50,000 is the average new automobile now. But then on top of that, to go out and borrow money, get a homeowner a car loan, 8, 10 %. And yet, do we see the under 40s and the under 30s flocking to the right or saying monetary policy is the most important thing to them? No, they say equality is the most important thing to them or something.
Jeff Deist:
So it’s a bit of a mystery, a conundrum. And I hope that… Well, I certainly don’t hope that economic conditions deteriorate. But if they do, I just wonder whether we can overcome this inertia and maybe encourage some of these candidates to go a little further, a little deeper than they have on monetary policy. Because, again, it used to be a non issue. Neither party talked about it. Neither candidate in a presidential election talked about it. The public didn’t care or think about it. But now I think maybe more do than they did before. And for starters, I know that Peter St. Ange is with us. I want to start with Biden.
Jeff Deist:
He’s got probably the best chance of anybody to be President again. He loves Lail Brainard. Who was Vice Chair of the Fed. She’s now his top economic adviser in the National Economic Council. He did redo Powell for another four year term. That would expire midway through Biden’s second term if he had one. And when I look at Lail Brainard, I think of someone who’s well to the left of Durham, who is what the left loves. She’s daughter of diplomat, she went to Harvard. She’s McKinsey. She checks all the boxes. And I would argue she’s maybe even more MMT adjacent than Janet Yellen. So, Peter, I guess let’s start with Joe Biden. Does this guy have a coherent notion of monetary policy?
Peter St Onge:
Yeah, thanks, Jeff, and thanks for having me on. Biden has the support of the people who count the votes. So I think our first assumption would be he’s the most likely winner in 2024. And I think you’re right. Leo Brainard, who a lot of people were pushing her for Powell’s job. And I would call her an MMTer. Biden has put out another couple of people, has tried to appoint them to the Fed, either attempted or succeeded. So Lisa Cook, who had been pushing for racial quotas on Wall Street, Sarah Raskin, who wants climate change to dominate banking. He put out Sol Omerova, who wants to nationalize the banking system. So whether it’s Biden or whether it’s handlers, they have been very far to the left, in other words, to the inflationist side of even Jerome Powell. And I think a lot of us, we criticize Powell so much for the money printing. And it’s sobering to remember that Jerome Powell is a centrist. I mean, he was appointed by Trump. He is what passes for a conservative Fed chair. And so after him, it gets a lot worse. And if Biden wins another term, then he’s going to get to a point a lot more people onto the board.
Peter St Onge:
I think we are going to see a much more inflationist Fed. And also remember that equity and the climate, we’re going to see a Fed that is paying a lot more attention to those kinds of politicized issues as opposed to sticking to its netting.
Jeff Deist:
Yeah, it is amazing if you followed the Fed’s press up Twitter. I mean, the stuff they tweet is just unbelievable. At the times, it got nothing to do with monetary policy. A lot of it is about getting more women into the economics profession. Sometimes it’ll be stuff about climate. It’ll oftentimes be stuff about equality or equity or whatever it might be. But what about Biden himself? Do you think, Peter, that he… I mean, does he know anything about monetary? But I don’t even know if he was ever on Senate banking. He was on Senate Judiciary, I know. He doesn’t strike me as the guy who’s animated by any of this.
Peter St Onge:
Yeah. And I think that’s the subtext that I’m sure we’re going to be getting into here is that if we take Biden and Trump as the legacy candidates in a way, neither of them are particularly interested in monetary policy. Let’s see, the Wall Street Journal said they are both free money, weak dollar advocates. Basically, both of them see the Fed as a useful piggy bank. They want rates to be low so that the economy does well so they can win the next election. And when it comes to the Fed, neither have displayed much intellectual curiosity or much of a sense of mission to push it either direction. So I think that Biden is just obeying the activists who brought him to the dance, and he’s repaying them with these radical candidates. I don’t think he himself, even when he had his entire brain at his disposal, I don’t think he put a whole lot of thought into the Fed.
Jeff Deist:
Yeah. I mean, in a sense, Joe Biden is not animated by anything. But here’s the thing is, J arome Powell is well to the right in whatever sense I mean that. But none of the.
Peter St Onge:
Less inflationary.
Jeff Deist:
Yeah. Ben Bernal or Allen had a book written about him, The Maistro. Ben Bernanke wrote that self, I should say, self collating book where he basically called himself a hero for his role in the financial crisis. And of course, Janet Yellen is the first female chair. And it seems like they’re almost due for the fall guy. And if things do go south, J erome Powell as the Hawk who raised rates relentlessly. I mean, Wall Street is going to hate the guy’s guts. Commercial real estate is going to hate this guy’s guts. The auto and the whole residential real estate lobby is going to hate this guy’s guts if things don’t change. He strikes me as someone that the left, generally in Biden, more specifically, could push off as a scapegoat.
Peter St Onge:
Yeah, I’m totally. And there were a lot of people who were asking why Powell didn’t drop out when things started turning south. He had his chance when he was up for reelection, and he could have declared victory, gone home and left the next guy with the mess. And he didn’t. And I think without a doubt, Powell has no friends on the left. They will throw him under the bus. And fundamentally, that’s what they… Whether it’s Newsom or really across the board among Democrats, they’ve been pushing to lower rates, not because of any sophisticated Austrian analysis of changing the rates too fast and you get the boom and the bust. And none of that stuff. Just simply print more money, please. Whatever you do, print more money. And this has been basically the platform of the Democrats ever since the beginning. The Federal Reserve is whatever you do, print more money. And then the Democrats or the Republicans have been the guys who come and clean up the mess here and there. And I think in recent decades, they’ve given up on that, concluded it’s a thankless task. And so now we have a bipartisan uniparty inflation to enjoy.
Jeff Deist:
Yeah, but imagine if as a country, we talked as much about Jerome Powell and Lail Brainard and Neil Keshikari as we do about Supreme Court Justices. Imagine if we knew as much about them and cared as much about their nominations and fredded about who the next president would appoint to the Fed. And we really should, if you think about it.
Peter St Onge:
Oh, we absolutely should. Those things are far more important. And that’s part of what Mises, what all of us try to do is they decorate monetary policy with so much jargon and smoke and mirrors. And it’s this almost religious process where drone Powell comes out. He stands at the altar and all of the assembled plebs bow down before him. And we all try to break through that and make people understand how corrupt, how dirty, how craven this system is. This is institutionalized theft. And with the kicker, it would be one thing if it was just theft. But of course, with the kicker, it then salvages the economy. It causes depression and inflation, all these horrible things. And so a lot of what I think all of us on this call here, Jordan, Stefan, we all try to make people understand what is the scam, what are they doing to you, and why this stuff is a heck of a lot more important than student loans.
Jeff Deist:
Well, let me ask Jordan. I know I see that he joined us. Jordan, what do you think about Trump? I know he’s a real estate guy, and he used to talk about how low rates were good for him, but bad for savers. Do you think he’s got any more monetary policy understanding than Biden?
Jordan Schachtel
Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. I think Trump is a mixed bag. As his legacy has shown, he tried to appoint Judy Shelton, who’s a big pro gold person to the Fed, and it didn’t really work. But then then close to the end of his tenure, he infamously was demanding the printing of trillions of dollars to supposedly fight the pandemic and all that. So I think he’s very much a mixed bag. I’m a big Bitcoiner, and I think that at the very least, a Trump presidency would be less hostile to Bitcoin because there’s that… I think the left has much more of a central planning impulse than the New Right or Trump Right or whatever you want to call it. But at the end of the day, I think Trump and Biden, whether they know it or not, are just passive Keynesians, essentially. They’re just propagandized by modern monetary theory, whether they realize it or not. And I think that there is no… You’re right that there is nothing close to a perfect candidate on monetary policy in the Fed. But I think when push comes to shove, when there’s a manufactured emergency, you get to see what people really believe.
Jordan Schachtel
And they talk a lot about wanting to set rates a certain way. But we saw what Trump did during the so called pandemic and what he did specifically to Thomas Massey, who just wanted, Congressman Thomas Massey, who just basically wanted a voice vote on the trillions of dollars spent. And Trump basically pledged to primary him. That effort was unsuccessful. But I think it really showed that the bottom line is that he’s central planning light, whereas the Biden administration is more central planning heavy.
Jeff Deist:
Well, it’s interesting. You bring up Judy Shelton. People may not remember. I mean, Judy Shelton, she was at Hoover for a while. She comes from the Larry Kudlow, King Dollar, Strong Dollar. Let’s have lots of export school. And that’s fine. But she’s a very sweet person, smart lady. And she really liked gold. She said some nice things about it. And talk about Trump derangements, Cinder. I don’t know if people remember, this was 2020, I think. A couple of years after that, when Trump nominated her, I’m sorry, I don’t remember the year for the Fed. The economics professional went nuts. They sent that open letter. It had 130 economists, I think, six or seven Nobel prize winners, including Stiglitz. And they basically said, She’s totally unfit. We can’t have her. So I had known a little bit about her just tangentally. Prior to that, I started doing some digging and I was like… She was like the Auntie Lail Brainerd, where she grew up in a rural area. She went to University of Utah, for God’s sake. She wasn’t part of the club. Everybody’s got to have gone to Walton or Harvard or Yale or Columbia.
Jeff Deist:
She’s not part of the club at the Fed. And that was, to me, just so outrageous that anyone thinking outside the box that had question, I recall she had question, among other things, the rate setting function, whether this is something the Fed ought to be doing, why it’s so powerful, whether we need a Fed at all. That’s exactly the person who ought to be on the Fed’s board to question things and act as a drag or a break or whatever it might be against the consensus. And that was, to me, that was a very Trumpian nomination. And she was treated very shabby. That was just not right, J ordan.
Peter St Onge:
Yeah. And I want to add that the fact that Trump put Judy in there, I think, means that Trump’s first instinct is anti establishment. He is open to outsiders. As J ordan put it, I think he’s, I agree, he’s a passive Kindian. But fundamentally, he would be a heck of a lot better than a Biden, I think, because he is willing to entertain people who actually want to fundamentally change the Fed, whereas most most establishment Republicans, for example, the limit of their reform, the Fed is to say, the Fed needs to do a better job, and they haven’t put much thought. They don’t really entertain any radical solutions like that. So I think it’s clear that Trump is a lot better than Biden.
Jordan Schachtel
For sure.
Jeff Deist:
I mean, what’s unbelievable, though, is the specter of Trump versus Biden again. I mean, is that really the 2024 race? It feels like if Biden has many more hiccups, that they’re ready. In other words, if somebody puts a shiv in Biden, it won’t be Republicans. Republicans are just absolutely powerless. They’ll be Democrats who want Kevin Newsom or Michelle Obama or whoever they want. It won’t be Republicans if this guy is not the number. And it’s starting to look like he is seriously, seriously unwell. And his son, of course, has his own scandals. My take is that the American public is utterly uninterested in the Biden family scandal. So again, it’ll be the Dems taking him out if these scandals suddenly start to grow in the mainstream media or something like that. You’ll know that this is the Democrats, not the skillful Republicans. So I think we should talk about some of these. There’s some fresh candidates. I mean, it’s cool to have RFK in there, to have De Sandis in there, to have Vivek Ramaswamy in there. I think Stefan’s with us. Let’s start with that because I believe, Stefan, all three of them have at least discussed Bitcoin favorably.
Stephan Livera
That’s correct. Yeah, thanks. Well, yeah, first of all, thanks for having me and great to speak with you guys, Jeff, Jordan, Peter, David. And yeah, so RFK is probably the most, let’s say, pro Bitcoin out of all the candidates. His speech at Bitcoin 2023 in Miami was basically, as I understood it, it basically sounded like it was written by a Bitcoiner, basically. He had really gone through and mostly tried to hit all of the right notes that the Bitcoin audience would have cared about. And he mentioned all kinds of things. He mentioned the Canadian trucker protest. He mentioned the freedom to hold Bitcoin and run a node and things like this, and also tried to, let’s say, tamper down some of his climate hysteria a bit about it and tried to say, Yeah, even if we try to have regulations on Bitcoin mining, that it shouldn’t stop you from doing Bitcoin mining, this thing. So it was very much pandering to a Bitcoin audience.
Jeff Deist:
I think.
Stephan Livera
Vivek’s message from his talk was a little more, maybe a little more seeing it like he’s going in there and he wants to try to downsize the Fed. So he’s very public about that, that he wants to downsize the Fed and that if they attack him back, it’s crucial that there’s a good backup option and that’s where Bitcoin comes in. So that was maybe his stance on the thing. And then DeSantis, obviously, people famously saw him do the announcement of his presidential campaign on Twitter with Elon and with David Sack s. And so famously, he said, we want to protect your right to do Bitcoin. So I think those are probably the key highlights, I would say. But like you said, Jeff, it’s probably likely as things are currently, it looks likely that it’ll just be back to Biden versus Trump and that little is going to change because as Peter said, it’s really just a uni party running the show. And if it’s not that, it’s just this deep state who’s in the background who are really pulling the strings and making moves and making things happen, regardless of who’s at the figurehead at the top.
Jeff Deist:
But still, I saw parts of his speech when I say his, I mean, RFK Jr. At Miami. The Bitcoin conference. And yeah, he was saying you should be allowed to run your own node. So clearly, he’d done enough research on his own or had a Bitcoin to write it or whatever. The very fact that we have candidates who are like, Hey, we think you ought to be able to use Bitcoin and not have to use the US dollar and not be imprisoned for it. That in and of itself, I guess, is pretty significant. I think Dave Smith, you spent an hour across the table with RFK Gator. I don’t recall you talking too much about Bitcoin, but what is your sense of him? Is he legit?
Dave Smith
Well, hello, everybody. First of all, I’m over at my inlaws house and I just snuck away for a second to jump on this thing. So I could get busted at any minute and brought back. But I think he’s legit in the sense that he believes what he’s saying. And he’s a very impressive guy and a very smart guy. That’s my impression of him. Again, this is from an hour conversation and then maybe a half hour outside of when we were recording. But I think that all of these things, there’s just something very interesting about his campaign. And I think from our perspective, or a lot of the perspective of people who are listening here, even if… I’ve seen some people who were like, Well, he was saying some very bad things a few years ago, and now he seems to be saying something different. Even if it were the case that he’s pandering to people who think the way a lot of us do. I think in some sense, that’s a good sign that that’s what politicians feel like they have to do in order to get some traction going if they’re not propped up by the establishment.
Dave Smith
So I find that encouraging. And I just find a lot of things about his campaign to be interesting. I think he’s singlehandedly forcing a conversation on several different fronts that would not be happening if he weren’t running for President.
Jeff Deist:
But we have at least a few Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee who would literally say Bitcoin should be banned, it should be illegal, which would presumably mean you go to jail for using it. But to my knowledge, maybe Biden’s the Avatar, but to my knowledge, we don’t have any presidential candidates saying that. And we see this new Bitcoin ETF. Okay, it’s black rock. That doesn’t make us happy. But nonetheless, it almost seems like Hayek’s idea of a competing currency gaining traction quietly under the radar is happening with Bitcoin, and that it’s a little bit out ahead of these guys’ appetites to destroy it. I hope that’s the case. It would be interesting to see one presidential candidate at least come out and say, I’m totally against it. We use the US dollar here. This is for money laundering and drug traffickers and whatever they say. It’s for hiding income and it should be absolutely banned and illegal. You have to use the dollars.
Dave Smith
Well, I don’t think I’ve ever heard a presidential candidate come out and say, I’m completely opposed to Ron Paul’s audit the Fed Bill or any of these talks about ending the Fed. I’m opposed to that, too. I think in a way, they don’t really want to promote any of these ideas. They don’t want people who maybe haven’t heard about this stuff to even hear about it. But I think there have been, like you said on house committees. Also, I believe it was last year, I’m blanking, I believe it was the chairman of the European Central Bank. Am I right about that? Was that the one who said the thing about how much of a threat this is because it undermines our ability to control currency and all of these things. So I.
Jeff Deist:
Think there are. Do you mean Christine Le Gard or earlier, like Mario Dre?
Dave Smith
I’m blanking on this. Maybe somebody else who has a better memory than.
Jeff Deist:
Me could. Yeah, Christine Le Gard is another… She’s the European version of Leo Brenner. She’s the antithesis of Judy Shelton. I mean, she’s everything we don’t want in monetary policy embodied in one really nasty woman who’s also a felon, by the way. Don’t hear that too often. Yeah.
Dave Smith
I was unaware of that. But I do think you’re right that this has been a thing that is almost like, with lots of different forms of technology, it almost seems impossible to fight this flood and that it’s getting so big in so many different communities. And now you see that both with RFK and with Ramasaki, Ram Swabney, I’m sorry, it is a thing that they understand that if they want to tap into this anti establishment energy, that’s at least one. The Bitcoin wing is at least one of those wings that they have to tap into, which I think is very encouraging.
Peter St Onge:
Yeah, that’s an important point right here. David and Dave have both mentioned that, right? That all of the outsiders now, in a sense, they are the least beholden to the establishment. And those guys all seem to have arrived at the same conclusion, which is that nobody likes the Fed. There was a time where attacking the Fed was like crazy land. That would mark you as a fringe candidate. We’ve got the number two Republican candidate, DeSantis. We have the number two Democrat candidate at the moment. These are not ridiculous fringe candidates. And they have both concluded that being unabashedly pro Bitcoin, never attacking it, always encouraging it, and being unabashedly anti Fed are the way to go. So I think the needle is moving away is, Joe Biden is 80 something. Trump is getting along in years. All of the guys in this race who are either younger or who are our outsiders, they believe what we all believe. This is impressive.
Jeff Deist:
In case anyone thinks I was being hyperbolic, you can look it up. Christine Le Gard avoids jail, keeps job, after guilty verdict in negligence trials. So she was enmeshed in a controversy over paying taxpayer money to bail out a French businessman. So anyway, you can look that up. Who might speak to Vivek Ramaswamy?
Dave Smith
Oh, I just had him on, by the way. Oh, really? Yeah. So the episode just got released either earlier today or yesterday, but it’s up.
Jeff Deist:
Did he talk about anything related to monetary policy?
Dave Smith
No, we didn’t get into monetary policy. He talked a lot about the deep state and his plans of really working against them. He was very good on the war in Ukraine, very good on the shadow government and deep state stuff. But unfortunately, he didn’t have that much time and we didn’t get into the monetary stuff.
Peter St Onge:
Yeah, he’s spoken against the Fed. Vivek has actually criticized the Fed causing boom bust cycles, quote unquote. His narrative at the moment is that they held rates too low for too long and then they hiked too fast. So that is completely ostro friendly. He’s going after the Fed for the dual mandate, which all Republicans do, meaning that the dual mandate is the idea that the Fed balances inflation with artificial stimulation of the economy. So he’s he’s been solid across the board in attacking the Fed specifically.
Dave Smith
So I heard him. His take, from what I understand, is that he wants to return them. He wants to abolish the dual policy and the dual mandate, and he wants them to focus simply on currency stability, which I don’t love exactly. I don’t know if that’s exactly the message I would want out there. But I’ll say that anytime a presidential candidate is talking talking about the Federal Reserve and being critical of them, that pleases me because I think a lot of people like us, it’s easy for us to lose sight of the fact that so many Americans still just have no idea what the Federal Reserve even is. And just to insert that issue into the popular consciousness is valuable.
Jeff Deist:
Well, from what I can tell, he’s basically the only candidate who mentions the Fed on his campaign website. His campaign websites are just such a joke. You think they would have a quick menu with a good, strong paragraph summary on major issues. They do not have those things. They are just full of pop ups to get you to give today $25. That crap immediately bombard you. But I thought I might ask Jordan, who is a true Florida man, to give us a little bit more on DeSantis. I know you follow him more closely. He’s a smart guy. He doesn’t come across intellectual, but do you think he knows a little monetary policy?
Jordan Schachtel
Yeah, I think he’s learning and willing to learn. And the willingness to learn, I think, is what separates him from a lot of the other fellow candidates in the past. There’s two different kinds of people in this world. There’s people that are stuck in their ways, and there’s people that are willing to learn. And I definitely put DeSantis in the latter camp. In Florida here, he’s taking a big initiative to go after preemptively the idea of the imposition of a central bank digital currency system. So he is reading and is very well aware of, like the global ruling classes plans to devise this system and implement it where you’re basically enslaved specifically with the Federal Reserve. I don’t know exactly where he’s at on that. I’m not a I’m a big supporter of his, but I’m not a surrogate or anything like that. He’s certainly pro Bitcoin. In Florida, we have this problem, especially among the Miami crowd, where we have a lot of these vulture VCs, crypto bros who are trying to soil the message. And I think DeSantis has done a good job at keeping them at an arm’s length and focusing on the big issues bitcoin, CBDC’s, monetary reform.
Jordan Schachtel
So I’m encouraged by all of that.
Peter St Onge:
Yeah, I was going to mention DeSantis. He’s actually been perfect on the Federal Reserve, like when he’s criticized. He doesn’t talk about it that much. He’s focused on the non monetary issues. But when he’s talked about it, so his narrative is that the Fed caused this inflation by financing federal deficits, federal spending, that they caused the bank crashes by hiking rates and that those rates could then cause, quote, potential economic turmoil. Again, that’s exactly our narrative. He’s criticized the billionaire bailouts of Silicon Valley Bank. As Jordan said, he’s been really solid on CBDC. Honestly, he’s been, I’d say, the strongest prominent Republican against CBDCs. So really, across the board, he has set all the right things on the Fed. I think he just doesn’t focus on it that much, t ack tically.
Jeff Deist:
Well, I want to get David Waugh’s take on all this. David, when I listen to these guys, the thing is I don’t know how you reform the Fed on the monetary policy side or how you even improve it without attacking spending? I mean, federal spending is the single biggest driver of inflation in this most recent term, basically since COVID. There’s two huge fiscal stimulus bills, $6 trillion cash cash. Fed had nothing to do with that. Other than winking a nod, we’ll buy any treasury debt that’s issued as the buyer of last resource. So go ahead and spend your little hearts out and we can paper over the difference. I mean, the Fed is always saying that, but is there an opportunity in 2024 to even begin to to wrestle down the spending beast?
David Waugh
I guess if it’s Trump or Biden, I would say absolutely not. And especially if the interest payments on debt continue to just rise to become one of the top categories of federal spending due to the rate hikes. But one thing I will say that we… Well, two things that I noticed. I just want to say that it was Mit Romney, if everybody remembers, that voted against Judy Shelton. And I remember that was really… That stuck out to me. I was like, man, really showing your colors, right? And then one difference between Trump and DeSantis, I think DeSantis is really, like you said, Jordan, open minded, but a difference between Trump and previous presidents. Do you remember how Trump would just tweet about the stock market every day? It was almost like he measured the economy based on the S&P. And if it wasn’t going in the direction he wanted, he would criticize Powell, right? And he used Powell as a tool to influence the S&P. And Biden hasn’t done that at all, right? Biden is basically, because it’s been convenient for him, seeded power to the experts of Powell, right? But I think that to answer your question about reforming fiscal policy, it would take a really brave politician.
David Waugh
De Santis might be able to do it. Vivek, I think he’s a smart guy and makes good points. I don’t think he’s electable in this cycle. And RFK Jr, however much I love him on Bitcoin, he doesn’t have the same poignant critiques of the Fed that Vivek and De Santis do. So I don’t think… I see RFK being great for Bitcoin, but not really RFK Jr, but not really being as good on fiscal policy.
Jeff Deist:
Yeah. If you go to their websites, again, don’t do this because they’re absolutely pathetic. But they all have these hokey… Vivek is t’s all about woke, end the woke mob. That’s you see. And RFK is this revital, which is build back better. So to me, RFK Jr. ‘S biggest selling point is that… And I talked to Dave Smith about this a few months back. First of all, he doesn’t appear to hate your guts. You look at the guy, you’re like, Hey, this guy doesn’t hate my guts. And so our standards for how we choose a presidential candidate have lowered a bit. So you start with that, the X factor, the likability factor, charisma, he’s a Kennedy and all that. But beyond that, just the idea that he wants to talk about issues in a way that he shouldn’t let his team give him these stupid talk points like revitalization. When he talks about bringing people back together and ending how fractured America is, how it is, that’s not really likely. That’s just campaign puffery. But nonetheless, you can see the allure of that. People, they’d give anything just to go back to that sleepy, normal feeling they had about politics before Trump, that things are just okay and you don’t have to worry about it and be so exercised.
Jeff Deist:
And your neighbors are putting some sign in their yard that basically puts you unnoticed that you’re a Nazi. People want that back. And I don’t think we’re getting that back. To me, RFK ought to be avoiding the platitudes. He had a platitude candidate, and Bitcoin would fit right in there. But here he is. I don’t know if people saw, but he put out something horrible yesterday on the Supreme Court affirmative action decision. And is he meaningfully want to cut spending? When I say cut spending meaningfully, what we all know is that means entitlement and defense. If you can’t cut those two things and not just cut the rate at which what we spend on those things goes. I mean, actual cuts, then the rest of the spending is almost superfluous because those two things alone and now interest on the national debt, those are more than EW tax receipts. I’ll just throw it to the panel. Is Gavin Newsom a possibility? Is someone like Michelle Obama a possibility? Is Hillary a possibility still? Even Mit Romney, to his shame, to his eternal discredit, has suggested he might run. Is there anybody out there?
Dave Smith
Well, I’d say I think Gavin Newsom is definitely a possibility. I think the Democratic Party is in a bit of a bind where I think there’s a lot of people who are thinking about ditching Joe Biden, but they don’t want to go with Kamala Harris, and he’s the next most likely guy. I don’t think Met Romney is a possibility. I just think he’s been so thoroughly rejected by their base. He came out and made that big call to abandon Donald Trump in 2016, and it didn’t move the needle one point. And I think that was the end of of Mit Romney being a viable alternative for the Republican. I think even the Republican establishment would recognize that there’d be more likely to try to co opt De Santis or something like that. I just don’t see that happening. To the point you made about RFK, I think he really believes in that stuff about uniting the country. I think he’s got the perspective, which, look, let’s be real. Growing up as Bobby Kennedy’s kid, he does not have an everyman perspective. This is a guy who grew up, has lived his whole life in a bubble.
Dave Smith
But he tells the story about after his father was killed and how he took this train from New York to DC. And it took 12 hours because there were so many people flooding the track just with signs that we love the Kennedy’s. And I think he remembers a time like that and desires to bring the country back to a place where we weren’t all at each other’s throat so much. I mean, I think it’s a fool’s errand. I don’t think it’s going to happen, but I think he means that. My personal view of all of this stuff, and I think my guess would be that you’d agree with me on this, Jeff, because I know you’ve said this about Trump before. I think that we do not really live in a democracy. And I think there is a 0 % chance that Donald Trump will be President again. And I don’t mean that he can’t win an election. I do not think these people will allow him to be seated as President again, no matter what that may take. I think the same is true for RFK. I just think he’s a no go for the establishment.
Dave Smith
So to me, the value of someone like RFK is not, will he cut spending or not cut spending? No, I don’t think he really understands the degree in which that is the real problem that needs to be tackled. But what RFK does have, and what Donald Trump does have is that they’re willing to have the conversations that you’re not allowed to have. And I think that’s the value that they bring to the table is that they will go into these areas. That’s the thing that RFK has been doing a lot. Whether you agree with him on all the issues or not, he’s willing to have these conversations that you’re, by the rules, not allowed.
David Waugh
To have. Yeah. And I’ll just add, it was wonderful to hear RFK as a Democrat, air quotes, but still say the word populist with a positive spin. But one thing I’d love to just to raise is the longer Biden stays in the race and RFK is polling at like 20 %, doesn’t it make it harder to just switch Biden for Newsom? Newsom is not going to come in polling as high as… I mean, maybe he comes in higher, but doesn’t it make it more challenging for that switch out to happen the longer Biden stays in the race?
Jordan Schachtel
Yeah. I think that they’ve reached the point of no return. David, I think you’re right that he will literally have to die for them to switch him out at this point. I don’t know if it was really popular on social media, but he’s like the dementia is clearly in reaching a new stage. But we’re so close. We’re not super close to the Iowa caucus, but we’re at the point where they’re going to have to make moves right now. And I think Jeff made a really good point that it’s not going to be the right, it’s going to be the corporate media. And if you see something weird happening in the corporate media, like they’re actually taking an active interest into the Biden family’s overt and obvious corruption and bribery schemes, then you know it’s a big signal that they’re going to replace him. But I haven’t seen it yet. And the feds just struck that slap on the wrist deal with Hunter Biden, they could have done much worse to him. So that indicates that the leverage is now gone. So to me, I don’t see any signs that Gavin Newsom can replace him at this point.
Jordan Schachtel
It’s just it’s seemingly become coming too late.
Jeff Deist:
Well, and if you remember, Biden really didn’t even campaign last time. I mean, it was 2020. Covid was unrolling throughout that year, and he just stayed home. He had a very light schedule. He showed sure as hell didn’t stand in front of a microphone or a podium or on a stage and explain the relationship between the Fed and the Treasury and deficit spending. He’s barely even talking to the public, and he might do that again. I think from our perspective or from the perspective of many people here, I think RFK did himself some severe damage yesterday. Gould guns and affirmative action are both the things that go to someone’s real… They really go to someone’s world view. It’s deeper than just the issue itself. But nonetheless, the fact that he’s willing to sit there and discuss things with some historical context, with some knowledge, with some obvious intelligence. And you notice, I’d like to make a comment to this, you notice Vivek’s doing this too, but RFK Jr. They’re doing podcasts. They’re not worried about CNN as much. They’re going on podcasts like Dave. They’re going on kinds of podcasts. And that strikes me as what you have to do, that the internet has radically changed presidential campaigns forever.
Jeff Deist:
And let’s hope that there’s a guerrilla warfare approach that these less established candidates can make use of.
Peter St Onge:
Well, and that’s potentially a game changer. I think all of us on this call generally focus on podcasts. There is no energy in TV. When I go on TV, I get zero reaction. A midsize TV or rather a midsize podcast is a bigger deal than going on Fox, prime time. And I think that’s exciting. And I think that’s part of the reason why all these outsider candidates are attacking the Fed and are supporting Bitcoin is that the gatekeeper keepers don’t have the monopoly that they used to have. There are a lot more ways to get out there. I agree that RFK made a big tactical mistake. He was cruising just fine. He was getting a lot of attention cross party among independents. And he didn’t learn what Trump knew, which is that you always stay loyal to the people who brought you in. Trump never said a bad word about the people that in his mind fundamentally brought him to the White House. I don’t know why RFK did that. He shouldn’t have because he was on track to inherit the Trump anti elite audience. And most Americans at this point despise the elite, whether it’s left or right.
Peter St Onge:
There is no energy in the elite. You look at a tweet out of the New York Times and they have 55 million followers, their tweets will get like 80 likes. There is no energy on that side. It is hollow. So I think there’s a big opportunity for Candice to exploit that. Rfk was doing great. I hope he gets back to that.
Dave Smith
Hey, can I just have real quick, Jeff? Sorry, I got to run in a second. But I just want to say, just to half defend RFK for the awful tweet about affirmative action yesterday, which I agree, I think affirmative action is disgusting and racist and horrible. And I didn’t like the tweet that he had. But I think it’s interesting that for a Democrat, the guy is running in a Democratic primary. He’s not Donald Trump. You know what I mean? He’s got to talk to his base. And I do think there’s a little bit of a tendency that I’d say, particularly within the libertarian world, to really pounce on people for not being 100 percenters. The truth is that I think RFK’s role is to be the best liberal. And he’s speaking to not just… I mean, he’s not just speaking to liberals, but I think primarily the value that I see in the RFK campaign is that he’s talking to a liberal base with the last name Kennedy, running as a Democrat, and giving them permission in a sense, in the same way that Ron Paul gave a lot of conservative Republicans permission to oppose the warfare state.
Dave Smith
He’s giving them permission to oppose the COVID insanity over the last few years and so much of the corruption and the deep state and things like that. So I would just point out that in my lifetime, almost every liberal has been for affirmative action, and probably about half of the so called Conservatives have too. Almost every liberal has been for some form of gun control, and probably half of the so called Conservatives have too. So I hope that people don’t write off this moment entirely, which I do see a lot of people really pouncing on them for it. And fair enough, it’s a bad take. But I just think that a lot of times I know libertarians will be like, I wish he would come over and be a libertarian and run on the LP or something like that. And it’s just like, I don’t think the move for RFK to have this cultural moment right now would be to become a gold bug and start reading Murray Rothbard or do something where he’s going to be talking to 1 % of the voting electorate, rather than right now where he’s polling at 20 %.
Dave Smith
And I don’t know that coming out hardcore… P robably, you’re right, he just shouldn’t have said anything about it. But I don’t want him to be a right winger or or a libertarian. I just want him to be the best liberal. I’m sorry, guys, I got to run, but this has been great. I’m glad I got to make it for a little bit.
Jeff Deist:
All right, Dave, thanks. Well, it is interesting. You poll this stuff. And as word, there’s a lot of polling today in not just political polling, but also marketing polling. And the term diversity actually does far better. The term affirmative action really polls poorly. It’s hated and not just by white folks. It’s really a deeply unpopular concept in the United States and really almost un American, I think, in the views of a lot of people. And so I think RFK junior Democrat, the idea of the black experience or the black cause is just woven into his DNA. I mean, if you look at his dad and his uncle in that period in American history, I think it’s just… So I’m not going to write the guy off about it, but it would be interesting if we had polling or data that talked about the Fed, that talked about monetary policy. And really, there’s an opportunity here for a candidate to use it as a populist wedge issue. I will say that monetary policy has an uncomfortable degree of generational warfare behind it. In other words, you can make a pretty strong case that baby boomers rode a really exceptional time in the West and bought houses when they were cheap and did a lot of things.
Jeff Deist:
And now social security is going to last for them. They all bought their houses in 90… All kinds of things that make under 40s unhappy, and I would argue, rightfully so. There’s an opportunity for someone to say, Well, the Fed is behind a lot of this, and that there’s all these cultural ramifications as to why you are sitting there with 100 grand in debt for your BA in psychology from state U. And you’re working at Starbucks and your rent’s $1,200, and any condo you’d want in your town starts at $280,000 or something. So this is a popular thing. Somebody has to be Trumpy with this.
David Waugh
Yeah, absolutely. And there is one poll that’s the Confidence and Federal Reserve chair to do the right thing, basically, that’s administered by Gallup. And it was in 2002, almost 80 % under Greenspan. Right now it’s the lowest it’s ever been for Powell at 36 %. So there is one poll.
Peter St Onge:
Wow.
Jeff Deist:
That’s Gallup? Yeah. Wow. Well, we’re coming up. I want to hear from Stefan a little more on his thoughts about whether… Is this thing just so broken that there’s no pulling back on the Fed, or in each other, or is there something that can be done?
Stephan Livera
Now, I say this, obviously, just to be clear, I’m not an American. I don’t live in America. I am an Australian living in the UAE. So what do I know? But my view of it is that there’s just too much machinery in America that will just keep things running in this certain pathway, regardless of what the voters want, right? Regardless of what the masses really want, unless you can really rile up a big group of them. And I think maybe that’s where I agree a lot with what Dave Smith was saying earlier about the value of candidates like RFK Jr. It’s not necessarily that we’re going to turn them into a libertarian. It’s that he’s going to give the popular relation permission to get angry about something, whether that’s the Fed or as you said, the generational warfare of boomers doing really well out of the Federal Reserve and just the timing of things, right? That they got lucky with the timing that they could buy houses that are nice or relatively lower priced. They could get the welfare state and they could get all of these things. I just think there’s too many constituencies to actually shut these things down now.
Stephan Livera
There’s too many constituencies that will not allow the welfare state to be reduced or minimized. And so I think because of that, they will have to eventually, whether it’s sooner or later, they’re going to have to run the printers again. Yes, right now the narrative is, Okay, we’re going higher for longer, or rates are going higher. So in my view, it’s a waiting game and that they will have to eventually run the printers again because, of course, everyone here on this basis and our listeners are probably focused and thinking about it, but most people out there are not. And so the deep state will do what the deep state needs to do to keep it going.
Jeff Deist:
Well, I want to give David the last word. David Wah. But before, I want to make sure that everybody is following and subscribing with Peter St. Ange over at Heritage. I know he’s got a subscriber thing on Twitter. And Jordan Shackle’s Substack, the Dossier is excellent. I mean, he’s like a really interesting, almost investigative reporter. When you read the lap dog press and it’s just so bad, we need these sub stackers out there, folks. But anyway, David, why don’t you just wrap it up for us? We got about a minute or two left.
David Waugh
Sure. I would say just everybody to honestly have a great weekend. And you mentioned Peter’s sub stack. I would point everybody to read his one next step in the bank crisis because I read that one earlier today and it’s fantastic. So just to everybody, have a great weekend.
Jeff Deist:
Happy fourth of July to everybody. We’re always going to be here on Fridays at 2 Eastern talking about money and culture and civilization. So stay tuned. We’ll be here next week. Thanks a million to Jordan, to Stefan, to Peter, to David. A little drop in from Dave Smith, famous comedian, formerly based in New York City. So we’ll see you soon. Thanks, everybody. You.
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