How Could We All See Inflation Brewing, But Biden Didn’t?

CLAY: We begin with a question that I think a lot of you have. How is it possible that all of you — that Buck, that me, all of you in all 50 states and around the world — could see inflation brewing almost from the moment that we started the lockdowns? And you can go back to the tape, and you could listen to Buck and I saying, “You know, spending 1.9 trillion additional dollars is totally unnecessary for covid.

“Maybe this $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill doesn’t make a lot of sense.” We gave tons of people tons of money not to work, and then they bid up the price of goods massively all over the country. There were a lot of people who were out there pointing all of this out, discussing the difficulties of shipping, discussing the challenges of finding people who were even willing to work. Well, now somehow the Biden administration…

After initially saying all this was transitory, inflation was, that it was short-lived, that we were gonna be back to 2% soon… Well, now Treasury secretary Janet Yellen came out and said, “You know what? Turns out the whole Biden administration was wrong about the path that inflation would take,” and, Buck, the other big part of this is they got saved from the worst aspects of their decision ’cause they wanted to spend another $5 trillion. They wanted to pour gasoline on the inflation fire. It wasn’t just they were wrong; they were so wrong that we actually are lucky they couldn’t do what they tried to do.

BUCK: Remember the Obama administration was so exciting for all the libs and the media ’cause Obama, it was amazing. But actually, you started to hear right after the one thing they rammed through was Obamacare, right? Not a single Republican vote. But then the drumbeat from the Democrats was always, “Obstruction.” Remember they just kept saying “obstruction from Republicans.”

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: And, “If only Republicans would do common sense” whatever — common sense gun reform, common sense immigration, common sense tax reform, pay your fair share, whatever it was. But that was at least the talking point. The problem… It was nonsense but that was what they were going with. The problem the Biden administration has is that the obstruction, it’s like they’re saying, “Guys, we were about to throw some gasoline canisters on this house on fire. Why did you stand in our way?”

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Their way would have made the single most painful economic reality of our current circumstance worse, without question. Joe Biden was going out there… We should — maybe we could — pull some of this just to remind everybody. He used to go (impression), “Maah, it’s gonna reduce inflation,” to spend $5 trillion. Remember he would do the loud whisper thing?

CLAY: One of his arguments, for Build Back Better — you’re right — was that it would reduce inflation.

BUCK: We’re gonna reduce inflation by having the government spend trillions more dollar than the government’s already spending heading into an inflationary period — also known as the Biden administration — Clay, is madness. And I keep telling everybody, I think we’re not through the storm.

CLAY: No, of course not.

BUCK: We’re actually just in those initial stages out at sea where like the wind as shifted and clouds are getting dark, and it’s looking rough out there.

CLAY: Listen to this. This is a remarkable acknowledgment that, first of all, we know that the Biden administration has no clue how to solve inflation. And one way that you know they have no clue how to solve it is they had no idea this was coming. These are the best and the brightest minds in the Biden economic administration.

Here is Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen telling you something that we were telling you over a year ago and somehow — despite the fact that we’re not trained economists and neither are you guys out there, by and large, who were listening to us — we could all see it. The Biden administration couldn’t. Treasurer secretary Janet Yellen.

BUCK: She has one job right?

CLAY: That’s all she has to do.

BUCK: To fully understand exactly the dynamics that she just laid out there, Clay, and I think that there’s always this push-pull, there’s always this built-in excuse for any government monetary policy and Treasury or economic official, anybody involved in that, and it is, “Well, if we create the perception of a recession, then we’ll actually make it a reality, right?”

If you tell people, “Guys, we’re gonna get inflation,” or, “Guys, we need to settle down here because we’re heading for a downturn in hiring, in the economy, in the housing market,” then you make that a reality. The problem is that means that there’s no corrective mechanism from the so-called experts that the Biden White House points to and says, “Well, the experts agree with me!”

‘Cause the experts then turn around, meaning Treasury, mean the Fed, and they say, “Oh, I mean, we don’t want to be pessimists here, right?” We don’t want to tell people we’re heading into the very stormy waters we’re just talking about, and so that’s how, Clay, this was the most obvious thing in recent monetary policy and economic history, right? Think about this.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: And it’s like a surprise to Democrats and Biden and not only that, as we were saying, it would have been worse. We said this on the show: If Joe Manchin does not stand athwart the Democrat socialists and say, “You guys really gotta calm this thing down a little bit,” I think we could have inflation 15%. Who knows? Who knows!

CLAY: I don’t think there’s any doubt. And a lot of the top business executives are pointing that out, that he was the only thing why it’s not infinitely better than it is right now. By the way, the only positive I can say, some of these forecasts that we’re now getting are actually pretty terrifying. Like, for instance, Jamie Dimon who is super smart at JPMorgan and obviously is much paid attention to in terms of his economic forecasts.

He writes a lot of letters trying to lay out exactly what’s going on. Let’s listen to a couple of these cuts, Buck. I almost think that expectations are so bad that maybe it won’t be as bad as everybody seems to expect. But look, he says right now, “The storm clouds are a hurricane down the road, and you need to brace yourself.” Listen.

BUCK: “Brace yourself,” from a guy who understands the markets and what actually affects your pocketbook, right? You have a lot of Democrat economists in the administration who know that they have to say certain things if they want to have access and they want to be well considered in their Democrat, elitist circles. But Jamie Dimon and people like him, there’s a penalty for being wrong, which is that people don’t listen to you.

They say, “Okay, you don’t know what you’re talking about when it comes to your money,” which they care about, and he’s saying, “It’s gonna get worse,” and we look at this, and it is gonna continue to get worse, unfortunately. There’s nothing about the Democrat proposals out there right now. The mentality, Clay, they don’t accept any blame for any of this.

They don’t say, “You know what? We were wrong about a lot of things. We shouldn’t have done a few of these things.” Instead, they just kind of whine and talk about January 6th and hope that Joe Biden remembers where he is when he’s speaking in public, which he doesn’t even take interviews anymore, it seems. So what’s that all about? It’s been 100 days.

CLAY: Yeah, look, I think the biggest challenge is — and we’ve talked about this some — there are relatively few people in the Democratic Party who have any knowledge whatsoever of basic economic policy. I mean elected officials. I don’t even know who you would point to now and say… We’ve talked about this before. If you had to draft somebody in the Biden administration and say, “Hey, this person is super competent even if I disagree with some of the decisions or perspectives they might have,” I can’t even do it.

If we had a fantasy draft right now and we got to replace Joe Biden with one of his administration officials, I’m not even sure, Buck, who would be better than Biden. And Biden’s awful, but who would you even point to? We know Merrick Garland’s a disaster. You just heard Janet Yellen saying her single most important job — which is, hey, don’t have two-generation worst, 40-years worst inflation — she totally whiffed on.

Mayor Pete was on paternity leave as we had the greatest supply chain crisis of all time. Kamala Harris is probably the most incompetent vice president of all time. I mean, we can run through the list. Health and human services… Who do you even point to, Buck, and say, “Hey, you know what? This person in their particularly small scope has done a good job.” Jennifer Granholm didn’t know the basic rudimentary knowledge of how many barrels of oil we went through a day. You’re the energy secretary. I look at the list, and they are… I’ve said this before but Abraham Lincoln had a team of rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote a great book about how stacked his cabinet was. Biden’s got a team of incompetents. They’re actually even worse than he is.

BUCK: This is what you have to do, though, if you’re gonna be a Democrat these day in high office. You have to worship at the altar of climate change. You have to be a stealth socialist. You want to be rich, of course, as a Democrat in the White House. You’re gonna take the book deal and everything else. But you want for everybody else, “Gotta pay higher prices at the pump. It’s good for the economy!

“You’ve gotta pay higher taxes. Well, that’s your fair share, right?” These are requirements. These are ideological acid tests, litmus tests for people to be able to hold these kinds of jobs. And because they’ve becomes so insistent upon this — and instead of going for expertise they go for party fealty — the people who are making these decisions are zealots and they’re incompetent. So when you have a whole group of incompetent zealots all sitting around together…

It didn’t work out well for the Soviet Union. I’m just gonna say it, right? You actually don’t want people sitting around you who don’t really know anything and all they want to do is stick to the party line and orthodoxy so that they can maintain their position and their of power. And I think that’s unfortunately a window into the Biden regime right now. You don’t have anybody… Look at all the disasters out there. You don’t have anybody stepping out, Clay, from a position in the Biden cabinet to say:

“We really do need to have a real discussion about changing course here.” Or even say, “You know what? If we don’t change course. I’m gonna resign,” because they all want to sit on the boards of those big, lib-dominated companies afterwards. They all want that book deal. They want to be welcomed on PBS and CNN.

And so done the suffers while they dance around and act like this isn’t because they’re a bunch of idiots which, unfortunately… When I say “idiots,” it’s really more about judgment and wisdom than it is about knowledge. Some of them, they went to fancy schools, whatever. That doesn’t make you smart.

CLAY: The idea of Modern Monetary Theory — which we’ve talked about some on this show — which essentially boils down to the idea that deficits don’t matter, and the government can print as much money, was ascendant as early as January of this year and certainly all of last year in the Biden administration as they were spending money hand over fist. Now the reality has reared itself, and it turns out that the economic lessons that we all learned throughout our entire lives — you can’t borrow massive amounts of money without consequential economic consequence — by the way, that’s still true.

BUCK: Yeah. And you know we used to have these debates with the left where we’d say things like, “Well, why not just make the minimum wage $100 an hour, right,” just to establish the point, or, “Why not just give everybody…? Okay. You’re gonna have the government paying people to stay home? Why not just give people, you know, a hundred grand and see what that does?” And the Democrats instead of realizing how crazy that is were like, “Yeah, let’s do that, actually.

“Let’s try that out. Let’s take this to the outer limits.” It’s madness, and, unfortunately, people are seeing it. You’re seeing it every day, folks. We’re not… You’re actually feeling it, seeing it, looking at those numbers when you’re at the pump, when you’re paying for groceries, when you’re sending in that mortgage check. Biden, build back not so better. That’s for sure.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BUCK: A symphony of wrong! Welcome back to Clay and Buck. That was all late and last year of the course of 2021 you had all usual suspects there, Biden among them saying (impression), “You know, right? Grr! Grrr, economists! Grr, yeah. Grr!” It’s just all nonsense. I tis… I don’t know if nincompoopery is a word, but I know a nincompoop is. We could make one up maybe. That was what was on display there, Clay. All of this, not only was it predictable in terms of inflation, we predicted it. And now we have to sit here and look at them while they go, “Oh, gosh. Who could have seen this coming?”

CLAY: Well, we keep saying, “How many times can the experts be surprised by how bad the numbers are?” If you just keep a tabulation… We could also probably put together a medley of experts saying, “Man, this is worse than we expected.” I don’t have any sense… We’re almost exactly — now that we’re into June — five months away from the midterms. My concern now is the Democrats — and we talked about this before, Buck — are going to decide to get one last bill in before they lose control of the House and the Senate.

And if that bill is passed, I have monster concerns that it’s only going to make inflation worse, but that Democrats are going to recognize, “This is our last chance to pass anything for two years,” and depending on how things go in the 2024 presidential election, they may not be able to do anything for years and years to come.

And so when you see the Joe Biden comments there and you recognize how out of touch and unable to come up with a coherent theory he is, I’m not confident that they’re going to go quietly over the next five months. I think they’re gonna rush and try to pass something that they are desperate to recognize would have no chance to pass for the next several years otherwise.