Sunday, August 11, 2024
Does Trump know ‘better than the Federal Reserve’?
There are a lot of poitical predictions involved in reserve bank decisions so who better to advise the Fed than the country's leading politician? But there is no question that monetary decisions will ultimately be made by the Fed board alone. As economists say, the president can "jawbone" the Fed but the board remains independent
Donald Trump called for three debates against Kamala Harris, said presidents should have influence over the Federal Reserve and conceded he might be losing support among black women during a news conference meant to recapture the spotlight after his rival picked up momentum.
The former president and 2024 Republican nominee said he agreed to a September 4 debate on Fox News, a September 10 debate on ABC, and a third on NBC on September 25. The ABC debate was previously agreed upon when President Joe Biden was in the race. Mr Trump had called into question whether he would face off on ABC with the Vice-President now at the top of the Democratic ticket.
“I hope she agrees to them,” Mr Trump said during the news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida on Thursday (Friday AEST). “I think they will be very revealing.”
Ms Harris said she was looking forward to debating Mr Trump on September 10, which she had previously committed to. The Vice-President also said she was open to having another debate, without committing to the dates or networks Mr Trump tossed out.
Mr Trump asserted that he had better instincts than the central bank’s chairman and governors. “I feel that the president should have at least (a) say in there, yeah. I feel that strongly,” he said. “I think that, in my case, I made a lot of money. I was very successful and I think I have a better instinct than, in many cases, people that would be on the Federal Reserve or the chairman.”
Mr Trump criticised the Fed, arguing that the central bank had “gotten it wrong a lot”. He noted that he clashed with Fed chairman Jerome Powell while he was in the White House. “I fought him very hard,” he said. But “we got along fine”.
US Studies Centre Research Director Jared Mondschein says the first debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris will be a “very different debate” compared to the one in June with Joe Biden.
Mr Trump’s press conference was meant, in part, to draw a contrast with Ms Harris, whom the former president cast as dodging the news media. “She hasn’t done an interview,” Mr Trump said, echoing a line of attack from his campaign in recent days.
Nearly three weeks since Mr Biden dropped out of the race and Democrats coalesced around Ms Harris as the party’s presumptive nominee, the Vice-President hasn’t yet sat for an interview or taken public questions from reporters. She has held large rallies and given statements to reporters on the tarmac while travelling the country, but she hasn’t engaged with the press beyond those events.
Ms Harris’s campaign shot back, saying Mr Trump hasn’t kept up as rigorous a schedule and accused him of focusing on grievances rather than discussing a vision for the country. “It’s why voters will reject him again at the ballot box this November,” said Harris campaign spokesman Ammar Moussa.
Mr Trump had been largely off the campaign trail since his most-recent rally in Georgia last Saturday, when he attacked Republican Governor Brian Kemp as “a bad guy” while characterising Ms Harris as overly liberal and weak on immigration. He was due to hold a rally in Montana on Friday night.
Mr Trump’s news conference followed a briefing by campaign aides for reporters in which they outlined their strategy for winning in November, largely by courting a sliver of undecided voters in battleground states.
“As long as we hold North Carolina, we just need to win Georgia and Pennsylvania,” Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio said.
Non-traditional battleground states such as Virginia and Minnesota – which the campaign said were in play when Mr Biden was in the race – remain in play with Ms Harris at the top of the ticket, senior Trump campaign officials said, further underscoring their view that Ms Harris’s recent bump in the polls won’t last. Early polling since the President left the race showed Ms Harris and Mr Trump locked in a dead heat nationally and Harris narrowly ahead in certain swing states.
Mr Trump acknowledged the changing landscape.
“It’s possible that I won’t do as well with black women, but I do seem to do very well with other segments,” he said, adding that he thought he was doing well with Hispanics, Jewish voters and white men. “White males have gone through the roof,” Mr Trump said.
He said he thought he was doing well with black men and might see less support from black females, but he said he could win some over. “I think ultimately they’ll like me better, because I’m going to give them security, safety and jobs,” Mr Trump said.
He played down the significance of abortion as an issue in the election, despite Ms Harris and Democrats making it a focal point.
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When Socialism Fails, the New York Times Blames “Brutal Capitalism”
Venezuela sits on the precipice of a revolution. Nicolas Maduro, the dictatorial president of the South American nation, faced a near-certain ouster at the polling booth last Sunday. Exit polls and unofficial tallies showed the main opposition candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez, winning with around 70% of the vote. At the moment, Maduro is still clinging to power by force. An elections commission under his control released its own results, claiming that he squeaked by with 51% of the vote and designating him as the winner. Few Venezuelans accept these fraudulent numbers, and even Maduro’s leftist allies in other Latin American countries are calling foul.
Perhaps sensing his time is limited, Maduro has now turned to a Soviet-style playbook of violent repression as his strategy for remaining in office. In the eyes of the New York Times though, Venezuela’s problems come from a different source. The culprit is not the Marxist strongman who’s desperately clinging to power or even the socialist economic policies that have thrust Venezuela into hyperinflation, poverty, and a massive exodus of its population. To Times reporters Anatoly Kurmanaev, Frances Robles, and Julie Turkewitz, Venezuela’s troubles come from “brutal capitalism.”
This was the conclusion of the newspaper’s coverage of Venezuela’s turmoil on the day of the vote. These three reporters extolled how the Chavismo movement, named after Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez, “initially promised to lift millions out of poverty.” “For a time it did,” they declare, “But in recent years, the socialist model has given way to brutal capitalism, economists say, with a small state-connected minority controlling much of the nation’s wealth.”
Note that Messrs. Kurmanaev, Robles, and Turkewitz do not name the “economists” who allegedly diagnosed Venezuela with “brutal capitalism.” Neither do they bother to explain what “brutal capitalism” entails. The Times reporters simply advance their interpretation by declamatory labels. To them, “capitalism” is somehow to blame for the unfolding humanitarian disaster of real-life socialism.
The New York Times’s bizarre interpretation of these events continues a long line of left-wing apologia around the repressive Chavez and Maduro regimes that have ruled Venezuela for a quarter century. Perhaps they had Joseph Stiglitz in mind as their “economist.” In the late 2000s, the Nobel laureate turned far-left pundit gushed with praise about Chavez’s alleged successes in “bringing education and health services to the barrios of Caracas” and did media appearances on the dictator’s behalf to promote a state-run banking scheme that never quite seemed to launch. His lack of self-awareness was on brazen display recently when he penned a new book that falsely portrays Milton Friedman as a “key adviser to the notorious Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet” (in reality, Friedman simply offered counsel to Chile about taming inflation—advice he gave to all manner of governments, left or right). Perhaps Stiglitz, who schmoozed with the Chavistas on an advisory trip to Caracas in 2007, should tend to the beam in his own eye before picking at specks in the eyes of others.
There’s a more fundamental problem with the Times’s reporting. In their strange attempt to reinvent Venezuela’s recent economic record as an outgrowth of “capitalism,” the newspaper ignores the obvious. Nicolas Maduro is an avowed Marxist. In a 2021 speech, he declared Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto “the most important political declaration in 200 years” and professed his fidelity to Marx’s theory of historical materialism. Maduro goes on to sing praises of precursor Marxist regimes, including V.I. Lenin’s Soviet Union, Mao Zedong’s China, and Fidel Castro’s Cuba. He portrays Venezuela as the successor to this legacy and tasks his regime with implementing Marx’s ideas for the 21st century.
Perhaps we should not be surprised to see the New York Times’s Orwellian attempt to reinvent the Maduro regime’s economic ruination as a product of “brutal capitalism.”The newspaper previously deployed a near-identical phrase as part of its 1619 Project, which ascribed plantation slavery to “the brutality of American capitalism.”
As with Maduro today, this historical designation had no basis in economic reality. Most plantation owners saw themselves as part of a pre-capitalist and pre-industrial feudal order—indeed,the slaveowners of the past designated market capitalism as a threat to slavery—just as Maduro deems it a threat to his socialist government today. But quaint concepts such as fact, accuracy, and precision have long ceased to concern the editors at New York’s self-designated “paper of record.” Like the Maduro regime they grovel before and uphold, only the political narrative matters.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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