Peter Navarro is done beating around the bush when it comes to pretending like the administration respects Fed independence.
To be sure, the president gave up on any pretensions to central bank autonomy a long time ago, but Navarro and Larry Kudlow were feebly keeping up the charade until recently.
In an interview with Fox Business on Wednesday evening, Navarro came right out and said that the Fed’s duty is to cut rates. “The Fed needs to do its job and cut rates”, he told Lou Dobbs.
[As an aside, you’re reminded that Dobbs recently went so far down the propaganda rabbit hole as to chance calling some of America’s most decorated generals “snowflakes” for having the audacity to question the president’s military celebration on the Fourth of July.]
The segment began with Dobbs explaining that the “leftists” and the “business press” are using the inverted yield curve to “feed their narrative about an impending recession”. It’s not so much “narrative” as it is accepted economic wisdom, but Lou was keen to dispel it on Wednesday regardless. Suffice to say his reasoning did not revolve around a nuanced discussion of term premium spillovers and convexity hedging flows. Here’s the clip:
(If the video does not load, please refresh your page – FBN interview here)
As you can see, Dobbs gave Navarro a pretty nice setup to brag about Trump’s economy, and after outlining the “Jay Powell problem”, Peter knocked Dobbs’s softball clear out of the park.
Eventually, though, things took a turn for the weird when Navarro’s cheerleading went on too long for even Dobbs to take. Presumably being prodded by his producers, Lou proceeded to demand a straight answer on whether trade optimism is or isn’t misplaced. Navarro tried to deliver, but Dobbs ended up confusing him and the whole thing dead-ended in this bizarre exchange:
Navarro finally got around to admitting that it’s “unlikely anything quick will happen” when it comes to a deal with China, something everyone already knew.
By any rational person’s assessment, Dobbs was sufficiently sycophantic to warrant a presidential propaganda medal, but the bar for impressing Trump seems to be rising, and Fox is having a harder and harder time clearing it.
“Fox News is letting millions of GREAT people down!”, Trump yelled on Wednesday. “We have to start looking for a new News Outlet”, he lamented. “Fox isn’t working for us anymore!”
Damn. Is that two tired old while guys confusing the shit out of each other, or Gary Oldman in his Dracula guise trying to kiss the ass of the animatronic Chuckie from the “Child’s Play” movies?
Wtf
Fox has “turned” on trump because they know he won’t win re-election.
I don’t think they have actually ‘turned’ on him but are definitely testing the waters. If he starts an actual war – they will marshall. If he continues to flounder, hey, they are just another business with a product to sell.
Conservative Republicans should turn on Trump because Trump isn’t a conservative Republican. There is nothing in conservatism or Republican orthodoxy that allows for an Executive to reassign Congressional spending to pay for walls that come from illegally seized land from private property owners under the protection of unlimited pardon powers. There is nothing in free-market thinking about a Sovereign deigning to choose who pays and how much they pay in import taxes by fiat. There is nothing conservative about allowing a President to dictate, without due process of law, where a company does business or where they put their supply chains. Republicans have thrown overboard free trade, an independent Central Bank, a free currency float, and even Reagan’s 11th Commandment.
Republicans are down to 5 1/2 core issues: perpetual tax cuts for the upper class, unlimited defense spending, banning abortion, a maximalist 2nd Amendment, racism, and half-heartedly, deregulation – exempting Trump’s Twitter tirades. That is it. That is their plank, for a national Party that is supposed to be one of two. For these five or six issues, Republicans are willing to jettison all rules of law, social decorum, civic cohesion, facts, science, the media, academia, technocracy, and eviscerate the Constitution itself. There is no going back from this. Republicans cannot go back to Mitt Romney or John Kasich after this. It is all Louie Gohmerts and Richard Spencers from here.
All conflicts start with FUD – Fear Uncertainty Doubt; and we are certainly in a conflict.
These two are not only stoking the fire but are tinder themselves.
(Sarcasm / Irony) Good leadership tRump!
Fox News, what a joke