Must-Read: William Poole: Don’t Blame the Fed for Low Rates
Must-Read: You know, given the demographic headwinds of this decade, the consensus of economic historians is likely to say that job growth under Obama was not weak, but quite possibly the second-strongest relative to baseline since the Oil Shock of 1973–somewhat worse than under Clinton, a hair better than under Carter or Reagan, and massively superior to job growth under either Bush:
: Don’t Blame the Fed for Low Rates: “Long-term rates reflect weak job creation and credit demand, both a result of President Obama’s poor economic stewardship…
…The frequent claim that Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen and her colleagues are responsible for continuing low rates of interest may be correct in the small, but not in the large…. The real villain behind low interest rates is President Obama. Long-term rates reflect weak job creation and credit demand…. The real rate of interest, currently negative for short-term interest rates and only slightly positive for long rates, is a consequence of non-monetary conditions that have held the economy back….
Disincentives to business investment deserve special notice…. The Obama administration has created one disincentive after another… the failure to pursue tax reform… insistence on higher tax rates… environmental activism… growth-killing overreach in the Affordable Care Act and Dodd-Frank to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Labor Department….
The Fed is responsible, however, for not defending itself by explaining to Congress and the public what is going on. The Fed is too afraid politically to mention any details of its general position that it cannot do the job on its own. Yes, there are “headwinds,” but they are largely the doing of the administration…. The Obama administration didn’t create Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, for instance, or the government’s affordable-housing goals—both of which fueled the 2008 financial crisis. But the Obama administration has failed to correct the economic problems it inherited. It has simply piled on more and more disincentives to growth. These disincentives have kept long-term rates low.
It seems to me that very little of William Poole’s argument makes any sense at all.
If the factors he points to were there and were operating, they would operate by lowering the future profits of both new capital and old capital. They should thus produce both (a) a fall in interest rates and (b) a fall in the equity values of established companies. We have the first. We do not have the second. Thus I find it very hard to understand in what sense this is made as a technocratic argument. It seems, instead, to be some strange fact-light checking off of political and ideological boxes: Obama BAD! Federal Reserve GOOD!!