Neil Cavuto: Fed Policy is the Problem
This morning I spoke with Neil Cavuto on Fox Business about the Fed’s decision to not raise rates earlier this week; my view, Fed policy is the problem!
An economy grows when good ideas are able to get funding, find talented people to work on them and are able to operate in an environment that is conducive to their success; that means limited laws, regulations, and a tax code that are all easy to understand and not costly to follow.
All the QE (Quantitative Easing) and ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy) have kept interest rates super low. That forces people to put their money into riskier investments than they’d like. Riskier investments by definition have to generate higher rates of return to compensate for their higher level of risk. High levels of risk are also associated with ideas, that normally wouldn’t get funding, but manage to get it by promising really high rates of return. If investors are pushed into more higher risk/higher potential return investments than they’d normally like, that means more of these potentially bad ideas get funding.
This means the economy experiences a higher failure rate than would normally be the case. That means more investors lose their money and more resources get wasted, draining the economy. Add in that the U.S. economy is getting more and more complicated with respect to legislation, regulation and a tax code that even the IRS doesn’t understand and ever great ideas struggle under the burden of trying to jump through all those extra government hoops that just make it that much harder to be successful.
In my discussion with Neil I refer to how we have a record high level of job openings. The chart below is from the Federal Reserve, but can be researched in depth by looking up the JOLTS report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
I also mentioned how the percent of the population actually employed is where it was nearly 40 years ago. This data is also from the Federal Reserve.
