Speaker 1: For what it's worth. You know, there's a lot of
pressure from the administration for them to go bigger. My
guess would be they would go twenty five basis points.
There's this, you know, dual tensions between what's happening in
the jobs market, which is soft and getting more soft,
which is one thing they monitor.
Speaker 2: But on the other.
Speaker 1: Side of the equation, you know, they're also monitoring inflation,
which has basically been sticky and has not continued to
decline since they started cutting rates last year when they
made three rate cuts. And I think they went too
far last year, which is why we've seen inflation stay
in these upper two point seven percent two point eight
percent kind of range where it's been here recently.
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Speaker 2: And welcome you are listening to and watching the Financial
Survival Network. I'm your host, Carrie Lutz with us today
is a new guest, Todd Sheets, Todd fellow newsletter writer.
You find him on YouTube at on Wealth and Progress,
as well as his site, which is toddsheetswriter dot com. Tod,
it's great to have you on the show. So hey,
it's Monday, September fifteenth. The world is anxiously awaiting the
upcoming Federal reserve interest rate cut and is it too little,
too late? What's the game here?
Speaker 1: Yeah, a couple of different perspectives, Carrie. I mean, first
of all, I'm in the camp that, you know, after
two hundred years of learning that central planning doesn't work,
it does not make sense for us to continue to
have you know, we can either a small body of
people of twelve people, or more practically, one person deciding
what the cost of short term borrowing should be for
a nation of three hundred and forty million people. We
would be far better off if those short term interest
rates were set in the marketplace without government interference. But
that's not the world we're in. So that raises the question,
you know, what are they going to do? What should
they be doing? It seems pretty clear that they're going
to cut at least twenty five basis points for what
it's worth. My guess would twenty five to fifty is
kind of the range for what it's worth. You know,
there's a lot of pressure from the administration for them
to go bigger. My guess would be they would go
twenty five basis points. There's this, you know, dual tensions
between what's happening in the jobs market, which is soft
and getting more soft, which is one thing they monitor.
But on the other side of the equation, you know,
they're also monitoring inflation, which has basically been sticky and
has not continued to decline since they started cutting rates
last year when they made three rate cuts, And I
think they went too far last year, which is why
we've seen inflation stay in these upper two point seven
percent two point eight percent kind of range where it's
been here recently. My personal view on this, you know,
aside from not having a small group of people setting
interest rates, is the bigger risks for the economy are
on the inflationary side of things. If if inflation gets
back out of the bottle again and the FED is
running monetary policies that are too weak, that is I
think the most potentially disrupting thing that could happen to
the agenda of the administration and to the economic recovery
that we'd like to see. You know, then they've got
to push rates back up meaningfully, and you know, we're
going to look at issues in the marketplace with housing
prices and all those kinds of things. So i'd i'd
air on the side of caution at this point in time.
Like I said, I think they they were too aggressive
and easing last year before they really got the inflation
rate back down to where it should be or lower,
which is two percent or lower.
Speaker 2: All right. So one of the ways that we kind
of see the public's reaction is precious metals prices, and
today we're hitting new highs yet again. You know, silver,
which is the one that I'm following closer than gold
right now. It's forty two thirty eight, up twenty nine cents.
Gold is up twenty two ninety to thirty six sixty
four according to kit Goo. So the market's kind of
speaking now, isn't it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And you know, I think the biggest fear out
there has to be when we are running these chronic
budget deficits of six percent or higher. The fear is
is that the Fed is going to monetize those deficits
by holding rates too low and or also buying a
federal debt, and that that is an inherently inflationary stance
for the Fed to be in, and that's a very
highly justified fear. I mean, this has been the problem
for central banks going back centuries. If we go back
to the seventeen hundreds, you know this was happening repeatedly
in Europe. As one country would go to a war
with another one, they would start to borrow money. The
central bank, whether it was England or France or Germany
or whomever, would print money to help monetize those debts.
The currencies would devalue, and it got to the point
where lenders were refusing to loan money to these European
governments because this was a repeating cycle. And that's finally
what drove Great Britain onto what became known as the
classical gold standard. Isaac Newton was actually involved in that
as Master of the Mint in the late seventeen hundreds,
and the classical gold standard basically lasted throughout all of
the eighteen hundreds and into the early nineteen hundreds, and
it helped fuel the greatest economic boom in the history
of the world, you know, to better than anything before
then and anything since then. Was this classical gold standard,
and the US was effectively on it for most of
that period of time other than during the Civil War,
and you know, we benefited more than anybody else. So,
you know, in terms of the fear in the marketplace,
I think the reason that you've seen longer term rate
stays stubbornly high, and you're seeing these issues with precious
metal is because you know, everybody's worried that these chronic
deficits are going to end up pushing the FED to
do the same things central banks have done throughout history.
Speaker 2: Yeah, It's like, no matter what the problem, no matter
what the perceived ill, the solution to the FED is
always the same, print money. Right, even when they're raising rates,
they're still printing money.
Speaker 4: Right, Yes, I mean in certain periods, Yes, And this
has been an especially you know, difficult or egregious problem
for the last twenty to thirty years. They played a
big role in created the housing bubble, and then in
the after the bubble, when the Great financial Crisis came,
they went back to the same playbook throughout the twenty tens,
which started pushing housing crisis back up. It's pushed stock
prices to PE multiples that are all time highs.
Speaker 1: Other than in a bubble. Kind of in a non
bubble environment, we've seen higher PE multiples the peak of
a bubble, but other than that, and so it's been
a very dangerous playbook for a long time here, and
for a while through the twenty tens, they got away
with it for a couple of different reasons which have
now you know changed. One was all the offshoring to
China and the low wage labor over there and going
hand in hand with that and the Great Financial Crisis,
we had very high rates of unemployment that persisted and
started coming down gradually later in the decade. But all
those things weighed against inflation, and so, you know, they
kind of were able to get away with it without
triggering consumer price inflation. But through this whole period of time,
that money has to go somewhere, and it was going
into housing, which is why we have a huge affordability
crisis right now because housing prices went up so much
faster than incomes were going up, which was not the
historical norm in the past. And then we've had this
run up in stock prices and in these precious metals,
in that kind of thing. So, yeah, this has been
a recurring problem throughout history, and an especially big problem
over the last twenty plus years.
Speaker 2: Could not agree with you more here, And so what's
the solution, abolished to FED?
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, yeah, I think that would be the solution
is abolish to FED. Get back to a situation where
we have short term interest rates being set in the
marketplace like most other prices in the system, you know,
and that is the place where you have millions and
millions of daily transactions taking place between borrowers and lenders,
and all of those transactions are determining where short term
rates should be, what lenders are willing to lend at
given their concerns about inflation, what borrowers are willing to
borrow at based on what makes sense for their business.
And instead of letting the marketplace discover the right interest
rate like we ideally do with most other I is
in the system, we've got this intervention where the FED
is trying to either pump up or restrain or hold
the perfect rate. It just makes no sense, I mean,
and it hasn't worked. If we had gone down this
path and we had, you know, sixty seventy years of
you know, great results. That'd be one thing, but we don't.
We have sixty seventy years of runaway inflation in the
nineteen seventies, which they finally got under control in the
late nineteen eighties. You know, they started working on it
in the early eighties. It finally got things back down
in line. In the late eighties. Things were relatively good
for about a ten year period of time there, but
then they went back to the same playbook, and you know,
that gave us the housing bubble and then it gave
us the affordability crisis.
Speaker 2: So true spoken like a true Austrian economis there.
Speaker 1: It's yeah. I'm a big fan of those guys.
Speaker 2: Actually were our friends over at mysis dot org and
Tom Dealer, Lorenzo good friends of the show here and
the really stand up people. They're also being suppressed by
a certain digital platform who will go nameless, but suffice
it to say, you are watching this or listening to
this video on that very platform now, so that should
tell you everything you need to know. Hey, so we're
not gonna we're not really going to see any of
this take place until there's an out and out disaster,
are we Yeah.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 1: The sad thing is we've had disasters. I mean, the
housing bubble was an enormous disaster, and you know, the
inflation of the nineteen seventies. But unfortunately, it's like this.
The fed's role as this interventionist in this entity trying
to manipulate the economy evolved so slowly, and it basically
evolved out of their failure during the Great Depression. You know,
the was originally formed, like we were talking about earlier
in the early nineteen tens, with the purpose of providing
liquidity to the system to help avoid isolated bank failures
from turning into panics. And that was their objective and
then their primary purpose, and we got to the Great
Depression and they failed to fulfill that mission. This was
Milton Friedman and Anna Schwarz, Yeah, which showed that the
fed's failure to do the job it had been created
for was what turned the Great Depression into probably the
worst downturn in the history of the country. So, in
part because of the fed's failure, FDR comes in and
with the brain Trust, they start experimenting with these massive
interventions one of which was to do the job that
intended to do the job that the FED had failed,
which was deposit insurance. So they said, okay, well we're
going to put deposit insurance on anything, and that effectively
I mean to some extent. I mean, the truth of
the matter is, by all measures, the number of bank
turns were probably at their nator in early nineteen thirty
three and had probably already bottomed out at that point
in time, and so it was probably over anyway. But
they put this deposit insurance in well, that effectively negated
the role that the FED had been created for. Because
deposit insurance, you know, that was going to stop runs.
People had confidence. Now it was a bigger blanket. So
the FED had to reinvent itself effectively after that, which
it did, and it reinvented itself, you know. I think
the key point was when William mackenzie Martin defined the
Fed's job as taking the punch bowl away before the
party overheats. And this was in the nineteen fifties, and
it was like, the idea was, well, if the economy
starts overheating, we'll prevent us from going into another depression
because we'll start raising interest rates, and we'll monitor this well.
You know, they then create the opposite problem when lbj's spending,
you know, the guns and butter spending of the nineteen sixties,
starts to click up in the late sixties and we
start running chronic deficits. What happens, the FED prints the
money to monetize those deficits, and that pushes us into
the inflationary nineteen seventies. And so then later in the
decade we get this Federal Reserve, new Federal Reserve Act,
which gives them the mandate of controlling both watching inflation
and watching unemployment. And so it's like this evolved so
gradually under the surface over time that everybody just accepts
the fact that we have them playing this enormous role
in manipulating the economy in spite of, you know, the
inherent theoretical fallacies of the idea to begin with, and
then on top of that, this long track record of
disastrous results that has come from this institution.
Speaker 2: So I couldn't agree with you more. I couldn't have
said it better myself. It's so true that this experiment
it's going to come to a bad end. One of
the other things that the Federal Reserve took on since
the Great Financial Collapse was basically that they're not going
to let the stock market go down either, and they've
been very effective at that. So I guess if you're
holding a lot of stocks a lot of assets, you're
a beneficiary of asset inflation. You think the Fed's doing
a great job. But when you go to buy groceries
or buy a house, you don't think so much. Todd,
it's great having you on. You find him at toddsheetswriter
dot com. Links in the show notes to this interview
on Financial Survival Network dot com. We've now switched totally
to substack. I'll be sending out a little message explaining
the decision to give up the traditional website. Todd really
appreciate you coming on. We'll talk to you again soon.
Speaker 1: I'm delightful to be with you.
Speaker 3: Thanks Kerry, thanks for listening to Carrie Letz's Financial Survival Network.
Your solution to today's trying times. For the latest, go
to Financial Survivalnetwork dot com. Financial Survival Network now more
than ever