On Monday, the markets had one of its worst trading days since the 2008 financial crisis. Stocks tumbled around the world, with a global sell-off, amid fears of a recession. The VIX (an index often called “Wall Street’s Fear Gauge”) was at times today as high as we saw it when the economy was shutting down for Covid.
This comes on the tail of a pretty insane news cycle: a presidential assassination attempt, Joe Biden dropping out of the race, the coronation of a new Democratic nominee, a stolen election (actually) in Venezuela, a Middle East on the brink of war. . . should I go on? But the most pressing issue to most Americans is and always has been the economy.
And with everything else going on, many of us have been paying far too little attention to the economic story here at home, and the policies that may have brought us to this moment we find ourselves in today.
To explain how we got here is Larry Summers. Summers was Secretary of the Treasury under President Clinton, and he was the director of the National Economic Council under President Obama. He was president of Harvard for five years. And he is one of the world’s most prominent economists.
Today: What is going on in the market? What caused it? Was it avoidable? What happens next? And what are the long-term repercussions?
If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to thefp.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
I gotta tell ya... I first encountered Michael Moynihan during Vice's reporting on the Evergreen/Bret Weinstein story. Later I saw him around in other places, and finally had extended exposure to him on The Fifth Column podcast. And when I see that he's been consistently contributing to the Honestly podcast as an interviewer, I couldn't be more pleased to know I was helping to pay his salary. I doubt you're reading this, but just in case you are, keep up the good work Moynihan. Guys like you are becoming more and more important these days, but are also seemingly becoming more and more rare as well unfortunately.
I struggle to trust the thoughts of a man like Summers, who would have promulgated the same policies hoping for a different result. I'll pass.
When the fed assists the "crack cocaine" of political policy (pump a couple of trillion dollars into the economy) you get a massive amount of money chasing the same, scarce resources. It's academic that massive inflation will follow.
What we really need is a much-much-less influential federal government; they always make bad decisions.