Is Jerome Powell intentionally tanking the US economy?
I doubt it, but these days it is impossible to rule out such things because the people in charge of our vital institutions are often hopelessly corrupt.
But even should it be mere incompetence, Powell’s Fed has been strangling the US economy by relying on government statistics that were either intentionally juked to benefit Biden and the Democrats (probably), or compiled by a million monkeys typing on a million computers trying to come up with Macbeth.
The Biden admin did more damage to the economy than they were publicly revealing.
The BLS just revealed that there were 911k fewer jobs from March 2024-March 2025 than originally claimed.
Look who predicted this back in February… https://t.co/8Bo7SWy3xP
— Vince Coglianese (@VinceCoglianese) September 9, 2025
It is impossible to overstate how ridiculous the job numbers produced by the Department of Labor have been in recent years. Revisions are a fact of life–early reports of the numbers are inevitably going to be imprecise–but the errors have been enormous and nonrandom.
Read Ed’s piece from yesterday to get the full scoop.
Errors should be random, one would think. The proposition that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is consistently off by hundreds of thousands of jobs in one direction during an election year is merely statistical noise is as plausible as believing that Joe Biden is as sharp as a tack. Pravda Media may want you to believe that, but they wanted you to believe that Russia hacked the election in 2016 and that Biden was brilliant and doing handstands whenever he wasn’t in front of a camera.
Getting it wrong by such a large amount isn’t just politically manipulative–it has consequences far beyond the political realm. It undermines our ability to invest wisely and can destroy the economy.
When Trump fired the person in charge of compiling these numbers, he was accused of injecting politics into an apolitical, technocratic process.
If only. The numbers we have been fed for years have been inventions out of whole cloth, as reliable as the claims that the border was secure under Biden and Mayorkas.
Jerome Powell has claimed that he needs to keep interest rates high to avoid an overheating economy and inflation, but the revisions to the labor market stats show that he has kept rates too high for too long.
Worrying about the tariff’s effects on the inflation rate is not, inherently, irrational. I get that.
Sadly, the Fed, or at least the chairman, are partisan hacks who don’t seem aware of their purpose or the tools to achieve it. If tariffs cause inflation, it’s not the kind high interests can address. Instead, they have the opposite effect.https://t.co/QH25KafJ8s
— Confessions of a Conservative (@TwisteChristian) September 9, 2025
However, it is unclear, first of all, whether interest rates would have any effect on that part of inflation, since the money supply does not drive it. Additionally, it isn’t obvious that the tariffs are having a significant effect on prices yet.
What a restrictive money supply does, though, is hamper investment and job growth. And that has to stop.
I am largely agnostic about the long-term effects that tariffs will have on the economy. The number of variables involved is too large, and Trump’s negotiations have yet to be fully completed. Powell’s concerns are driven mainly by theory and not practical experience. And given how poor the statistics are upon which he bases his decisions, it’s obvious that the Fed is basically making up policy without any basis in reality.
We should always be skeptical about politicians getting involved in decisions about monetary policy–they always have a bias toward growth over price stability. But the past decade has shown that we should be equally skeptical about the way the Fed makes policy. There is a cult of the experts, and experience has shown experts to be ideologues more than oracles of the truth.
The Fed will almost certainly reduce rates very soon, but once again Trump has been proven right: it is already too late to avoid damage to the economy.
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