An MSNBC anchor revealed in a recent segment that she was hospitalized with heart inflammation in December, leading her to miss work for about a month.
Yasmin Vossoughian said that the health scare started on Dec. 20 when she started to experience chest pains that “waxed and waned over a period of 10 days.” Those pains “continued to get worse” over the coming days, she added.
The anchor, who hosts a weekend program on the left-wing network, said she went to urgent care on Dec. 30 and was told she had acid reflux. A day later, she woke up with severe chest pains and pain in her left shoulder, leading her to believe she was suffering from a heart attack.
Vossoiughian, 44, said she went to the emergency room. Doctors diagnosed her with pericarditis, or inflammation of the lining of the heart. They claimed it was caused by “a literal common cold,” she said.
She added that she doesn’t smoke, she runs several miles per week, does yoga, doesn’t eat meat, and drinks occasionally. “I’m a pretty healthy person,” she said.
After she was admitted to the hospital, she spent several days there before she was released on Jan. 4, Vossoiughian said.
“But that was not the end … three days later, I was readmitted when I felt a flutter in my heart like a butterfly,” she said. Doctors then informed her that she developed myocarditis, inflammation of the heart muscle, and she spent another five days in the hospital.
Vossoiughian then said that it was “just the cold that was doing … all the inflammation in and around my heart.”
Speculation
With Vossoiughian’s confirmation that she suffered pericarditis and myocarditis, there was widespread speculation on social media that it may have been caused by a COVID-19 vaccine or booster. The MSNBC host did not make mention of COVID-19 or vaccines during her segment, and she said her doctors blamed it on the common cold virus.
Both pericarditis and myocarditis are considered side effects of mRNA vaccines manufactured by Pfizer and Moderna, according to the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But, according to Johns Hopkins University, while rare, myocarditis can be caused “by an infection in the body,” including the common cold, influenza, and COVID-19. Bacterial, fungal, and parasitic infections can also lead to myocardial inflammation.
The Myocarditis Foundation, meanwhile, says that “viral infections are the leading cause of myocarditis,” but it notes that “a wide range of infections, diseases, and substances may cause this condition.”
And the UK National Health Service says that “pericarditis often follows a viral infection, such as a sore throat or cold.”
In 2021, Vossoiughian wrote on social media that she was fully vaccinated for COVID-19. “We are both vaccinated…that was confirmed before this pic!” she said in April of that year. Comcast’s NBCUniversal also mandated that its employees, including those working at MSNBC, get the vaccine before returning to the office in early 2022.
Trader Makes Huge $80 Million Bet Fed Is Wrong Again, Will Cut Below 4.2% By Year End
Earlier this week, we quoted Bloomberg trader and market commentator Vince Cignarella who said that “In More Than 40 Years Of Trading, Never Have I Witnessed A Market Fighting The Fed As Boldly As This One” and judging by Powell’s remarkable verbal pivot yesterday, there was good reason for that: the market was spot on, and Powell appears to have conceded that inflation will run much hotter, as he refuses to push back against risk prices any more.
So now that Powell pussied out, it’s open season on the residents of Marriner Eccles, and as Bloomberg reports a trader has put on a massive bet that the Fed will soon cave on promise that it will not cut rates this year, but will instead start slashing rates at a frenzied pace later this year.
The $80 million bet which was placed via options tied to the Secured Overnight Financing Rate, or SOFR, underscores the sentiment shift across markets that not only is the Fed’s tightening cycle almost over, but that the next step will be an accelerating easing campaign.
As Bloomberg’s Edward Bolingbroke observed, an unidentified investor started amassing the position in the morning and continued buying through the afternoon as Fed Chair Jerome Powell expressed confidence that inflation was improving.
The trade’s $80 million outlay would turn into a $400 million profit if the Fed were to cut its benchmark rate to 2.5% by the end of the year. A lesser amount of cuts, to 3.8%, would lead to a $100 million gain, according to Bloomberg’s Option Scenario Analysis function.
While the market is certainly pricing in aggressive rate cuts by year end – a 50bps cut to 4.4% in December from a 4.9% June peak, is now very much a given – a plunge to 2.5% in Fed Funds would be unprecedented and even a drop to 3.8% would require some unexpected shock to startle the Fed. The breakeven for the trade at expiry is a yield level of approximately 4.2%, so it is only profitable if the Fed cuts below this level.
As Bolingbroke explains, the $80 million SOFR bet was placed via a December 2023 SOFR call spread, where the owner of the position is long one strike equivalent to a 4.5% yield and short a higher strike equivalent to a 2.5% yield, where the maximum profit would be reached. Thursday’s preliminary Chicago Mercantile Exchange open interest data suggested the trade was a new position. Those options expire December 15, two days after the Fed’s final policy meeting of 2023.
Of course, once you start fighting the Fed – successfully – you don’t stop until you win, and on Thursday, another big SOFR options trade hit the tape, amounting to about $50 million. It stands to benefit from a continued collapse in volatility through the end of the year that would coincide with the steep rate cuts priced into markets.
Old clips of Mister Rogers, a children’s TV show from the 1980s, have gone viral on social media after leftists were triggered by the character in the show singing a song about ‘boys being boys and girls being girls’.
Fred Rogers, who hosted Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood for decades, is seen in the footage singing a song explaining to children that there are two genders, that boys and girls are different, but that everyone is equal.
“Boys are boys from the beginning, girls are girls right from the start. Everybody’s fancy, Everybody’s fine. Your body’s fancy and so is mine,” Rogers sings.
Further stanzas of the song include the assertions “If you were born a boy, you stay a boy,” and “Only girls grow up to be the mommies, only boys can be the daddies.”
The message was considered entirely wholesome, even up until the show aired its last episode in 2001, yet now in our 2023 reality the message is being labelled triggering and upsetting.
TRIGGER WARNING. ⚠️ This is the most upsetting thing you will see all weekend. pic.twitter.com/eVLPZ3J3RI
In an appearance on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, Rogers expanded on the meaning of the song, explaining to some laughter in the audience that it is an important societal responsibility to define gender roles to children:
Mister Rogers knew something way back in 1980 and tried to warn us. We laughed at him because we thought what he said was silly and nonsense.
And if he were still alive today, he’d say that it’s okay to be trans and nobody should hurt you because of it.
The man cared about everyone and transpeople weren’t as prevalent and as forthcoming as they are now with science backing them. He’d love them just as well.
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Ilhan Out: House Boots Omar From Foreign Affairs Committee
The House on Thursday voted to pass a resolution removing Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) from her position on the Foreign Affairs Committee.
The move came after Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) rallied 218 Republicans to back the resolution condemning Omar for previous comments deemed antisemitic, and removing her from the committee. One Republican, Rep. Dave Joyce of Ohio, voted present, NBC News reports.
NOW – House Republicans have passed a resolution to remove Rep. Ilhan Omar from the House Foreign Affairs Committee over past comments about Israel. pic.twitter.com/75NlvUxvbF
Prior to her removal, Omar gave an emotional and defiant floor speech, blaming her ouster on racism.
“There is this idea that you are a suspect if you are an immigrant, or if you are from certain parts of the world or a certain skin tone, or a Muslim. It is no accident that members of the Republican Party accused the first black president, Barack Obama, of being a secret Muslim,” she said, adding “Well, I am Muslim.”
“I am an immigrant, and interestingly, from Africa. Is anyone surprised that I am being targeted? Is anyone surprised that I am somehow deemed unworthy to speak about American foreign policy? Or that they see me as a powerful voice that needs to be silenced?”
Ilhan Omar closes the debate and says, “this debate today is about who gets to me an American … I am Muslim. I am an immigrant … is anyone surprised that I am being targeted? … I am an American. pic.twitter.com/vKNzXXJSse
On Sunday, Omar attempted to do damage control ahead of this week’s vote – telling CNN that she didn’t realize she was being anti-Semitic when she said that “Israel has hypnotized the world” while doing “evil.”
Ilhan Omar on CNN: “I might’ve used words at the time that I didn’t understand were trafficking in anti-Semitism. When that was brought to my attention, I apologized, I owned up to it. That’s the kind of person that I am.” pic.twitter.com/4vZ4kqq6ht
It’s unofficially official: Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley will be announcing later this month that she’ll be running for the Republican nomination for president.
On February 15, Haley will be making a “special announcement” at the Charleston, South Carolina, Visitor Center, and it’s widely reported that it’ll be a formal declaration of her run for president.
Haley has been making the rounds on Fox News and planting seeds for her run, telling Bret Baier in January, “I think it’s time for new, generational change. I don’t think you don’t need to be 80 years old to go be a leader in D.C.,” and then excerpting that clip on Twitter. Her profile’s pinned tweet right now is of a subsequent appearance on Sean Hannity’s show during which she not-very-subtly hinted at a run.
Today, she tweeted a link to an interview from 2021 where she called for a cognitive test for older politicians, seen as a dig at President Joe Biden, 80, and an observation about former President Donald Trump, 76, who has already announced he’s running again.
Haley served Trump as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations but stepped down in 2018. They notably disagreed with how to deal with Russia’s aggressive behavior when Trump was in office. Haley called for more sanctions against Russia in 2018, but Trump resisted both her and Congress until reluctantly relenting. It seems likely that this difference in position will be a point of contention during the race.
Haley supports U.S. and NATO assistance in arming Ukraine against Russia and also wants the U.S. to take a harder line against China’s oppressive government. It’s worth noting that she doesn’t see trade conflicts with countries like China as an excuse for domestic corporate handouts. She opposed a bill last year to provide billions in federal subsidies to the domestic semiconductor chip industry, sold by the Biden administration as a way to resolve supply chain issues and compete with China. (Reason‘s Eric Boehm has been calling out the problems with this plan for some time.)
Though, a good chunk of her objection was over concerns that the money would be funneled to China through the market: “The way to encourage innovation and strengthen our national security isn’t through corporate handouts,” she told Fox in July. “As Americans suffer from the worst inflation in 40 years, this legislation doesn’t ensure that our best asset—our innovation—won’t be funneled back to help Communist China. That’s a bad deal for the American people.”
So, on the one hand, she doesn’t want corporate welfare, which is good. On the other hand, she’s itching for a trade war with China, which is bad for consumers (and most definitely not a way to fight inflation).
Haley’s Republican conservativism trends pretty mainstream—she is very opposed to abortion and favors strong borders with heavy police enforcement of immigration policies. As governor of South Carolina, she signed a bill that created an immigration enforcement unit and required police to check the citizenship of anybody they stopped to make sure they were in the country legally. The law also mandates that private employers use the flawed E-Verify system to prove that people they hire are legally in the country, putting her in good company with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, with whom she may compete in the race for the Republican nomination.
As for some of the other culture war populism that has animated both the left and the right, Haley opposes the teaching of critical race theory in schools and has called for every governor in the country to ban funding for its teaching. But she supports school choice and parents’ rights to provide their kids the education that they want. She, like DeSantis, is stumbling into the conservative populist contradiction of refusing to consider that some parents support teaching their children subjects Haley doesn’t approve of.
As for LGBT issues that might come up in the primary, in 2016 as governor she said South Carolina didn’t need a bill proposed by Republican lawmakers mandating that people use the public restrooms that match the sex listed on their birth certificates. But she opposes letting trans women compete in sports alongside other women and has complained about “woke culture” weakening the military in some vague fashion.
Her former boss, Trump, is so far the only Republican to formally announce a run for the presidency. He responded to her plans with a post on Truth Social that “Nikki has to follow her heart, not her honor. She should definitely run!” He included a clip of Haley from 2021 from a press conference where she said that she would not run for president if Trump ran.
By Ven Ram, Bloomberg markets live reporter and strategist
On Wednesday, Fed Chair Jerome Powell often peppered his answers by intersplicing “Let’s see.”
As it turned out, that provided enough comfort for the markets.
You could parse his entire post-meeting remarks and why Treasuries rallied, but here’s what I took away.
This is what he essentially said:
“It’s a forecast of slower growth, some softening in the labor market and inflation moving down steadily, but not quickly…
…If the economy performs broadly in line with those expectations, it will not be appropriate to cut rates this year…
…If inflation comes down much faster, we’ll be seeing that, and that will be incorporated into our thinking…we’ll see.”
The markets read it thus:
“Well, essentially, let’s invert what you just said:
if the economy goes pear-shaped and inflation comes down a lot, you are willing to cut. We will bet our last farthing that inflation will come off rapidly.”
So what will decide who wins that tussle between the markets and the Fed?
There are plenty of indicators to look at, including core PCE ex-housing, which he emphasized.
For me, I will be watching core PCE inflation – now at 4.4% to come down to the 3.5% penciled in by the Fed for this year – before holding my breath.
Manchin, Cruz Reveal New Bipartisan Bill Halting Biden From Selling Emergency Oil Reserves To China
The Biden administration’s draining of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to four-decade lows to ease market tightness drew sharp criticism from the fossil fuel industry and Republican lawmakers. What ignited controversy last summer was when one SPR shipment was delivered to an entity tied with the Chinese Communist Party.
Now a group of bipartisan lawmakers wants to ensure America’s emergency crude oil reserves are never sent to China again.
On Wednesday, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va. and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and several other lawmakers introduced the Protecting America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve from China Act.
The bipartisan legislation would prohibit exporting crude oil from the SPR to China. A similar piece of legislation was recently passed in the US House of Representatives by a large majority, 331-97.
“The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is a vital piece of our nation’s infrastructure that bolsters our energy and national security. While the reserve has been a policy Band-Aid for rising gas prices and the global unrest caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the reserve is, above-all, meant to help the United States and our allies through difficult times, not to help China power its economy,” Manchin, who serves as the chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, wrote in a statement.
He continued: “This bill would ensure that we are not risking our energy security by selling our petroleum reserves to China, and the bipartisan support this legislation has received shows just how important it is for America to be energy secure and independent.”
The latest Department of Energy data shows the Biden administration drained the SPR to the lowest levels since 1983, all in an attempt to ease crude market tightness.
What sparked outrage was when Biden sent 5.9 million barrels to a Chinese firm last July. This is because strategic reserves are to ensure domestic energy security.
“The Strategic Petroleum Reserve was intended to ensure that America had sufficient oil reserves in the event of an emergency. Under no circumstances should we sell any part of this stockpile to the Chinese Communist Party or any company under its control.
“We need to immediately act to stop this from happening in the future and unleash American energy, and I’m proud to work with my colleagues and Sen. Joe Manchin on this important, bipartisan issue,” Cruz said in a statement.
The SPR is the world’s largest supply of emergency crude oil, with four storage sites in Texas and Louisiana designed to alleviate significant oil supply shortages during major geopolitical events or natural disasters. The steep declines by Biden, who blamed Russia’s Ukraine war for the “price hike at the pump,” has been hellbent on draining the reserves.
Some good news: Biden Administration plans to replenish the SPR later this year.
Remember a few years ago when former President Trump received criticism for his plan to fill up the SPR when crude prices crashed?
Also, we might add that gas and diesel prices at the pump are elevated because the US has a refinery capacity problem.
It’s been a year since four Department of Defense (DOD) whistleblowers found a sudden increase in various diseases in the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED), which coincided directly with the introduction of COVID-19 vaccinations. Now, new data shows more evidence.
That’s according to Lt. Col.Theresa Long, M.D., MPH, a board-certified aerospace medicine doctor and Army Brigade flight surgeon with specialty training as an aviation mishap investigator and safety officer, who was one of the four whistleblowers. Long’s background has uniquely equipped her to recognize what she described as “unusual diagnoses and alarming trends only after the introduction of the COVID-19 vaccinations.”
Sharp Increase in Serious Harm Reports in Pilots: DOD Data
Long said what she has now found has led her to file yet another whistleblower complaint with Sen. Ron Johnson’s (R-Wis.) office. She described this data as “more alarming DMED data” after she “went back into the ‘fixed’ DMED again to look for signals of harm for Army aviation.”
“What I found was a clear signal, that something in 2021 changed the health of service members,” Long told The Epoch Times. She said these signals were consistent with those in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports. But unlike VAERS reports, DMED data showed spikes in the number of diagnoses “made by a healthcare professional within the DOD on service members.”
According to the Military Health System, the DMED provides remote access to a subset of data contained in the Defense Medical Surveillance System (DMSS). The DMSS contains up-to-date and historical data on diseases and medical events (including reportable events) and “is available to authorized users such as U.S. military medical providers, epidemiologists, medical researchers, safety officers or medical operations/ clinical support staff for surveying health conditions in the U.S. military.”
“After querying all pilots across the DOD, for all-cause morbidity and mortality, I found a stunning increase in the number of reportable events, spiking from an average of 226 reportable events a year (2016-2019) to 4,059 reports in 2022,” she explained.
A DOD reportable event is any patient safety event resulting in death, permanent harm, or severe temporary harm—and all require a comprehensive systematic analysis and a follow-on corrective action implementation plan report.
“The point is there is a statistically significant increase in death, permanent harm, or severe temporary harm in young healthy fit pilots,” she continued.
Such injuries were more obviously shown in this population. Because aviation pilots are required to have a superior level of health and fitness, and their health conditions are under more strict monitoring, according to Long.
What spurred Long on to pull this second round of data was when she learned the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had quietly made changes to the acceptable parameters of PR intervals (representative of the first part of a heartbeat, measured in seconds or milliseconds) on electrocardiograms of pilots. The FAA didn’t respond with research and data to support their decision, according to Long.
Those actions led to the press release dated Jan. 27, 2023 from Johnson in a letter to the FAA, where he stated the following details:
“Based on data from the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database, the whistleblower [Theresa Long] reported that the total number of disease and injuries [reportable events] in pilots across the DOD was 265 in 2016, 252 in 2017, 164 in 2018, 223 in 2019, 2,194 in 2020, 2,861 in 2021, and 4,059 in 2022.”
Johnson also told The Epoch Times these statistics “raise questions as to whether FAA has seen similar increases in disease and injuries in individuals in the aviation industry.”
Long noted that in the “post-glitch” DMED, the number of reportable events across the DOD had gone from a four-year average (2016-2019) of 40,813 to 110,000 in 2020 to over 200,000 in 2022.
“Some would ask why the numbers start increasing in 2020, you have to remember the Pfizer/DOD study with 43,448 participants started on July 27, 2020.”
Long emphasized that her opinions do not reflect those of the Army or the DOD.
Looking back, she said it was after being stonewalled for answers regarding adverse events from the COVID vaccine that she began performing queries in the DMED. She wanted to know if what she was seeing within her brigade were isolated anomalies or part of a wider disaster unfolding.
Whistleblowers First Report Discrepancies in DOD Data
It was in January of 2022 when Long, along with two other U.S. military doctors, Dr. Samuel Sigoloff and Special Forces flight surgeon Lt. Col. Peter Chambers, and Army Public Health Officer 1 Lt. Mark Bashaw first blew the whistle on the DOD. Together, they filed the initial whistleblower complaints regarding the DMED data, which showed an inordinate amount of negative health-related conditions related to the vaccine.
The initial DMED data given to Johnson showed a massive rise in cases of anxiety, esophageal cancer, breast cancer, female infertility, miscarriages, HIV, acute myocarditis, and Bell’s palsy among other conditions after the vaccine was mandated for U.S. military members.
Long added that after the DMED data was presented, Moderna, the pharmaceutical and biotechnology company behind one of the COVID-19 vaccinations and its mRNA immune response technology, lost $140 billion of dollars in stock.
Yet, despite the alarming data coming directly from the DOD’s own $42 million medical surveillance database, the department’s official claimed that the discovery of the data was a “data glitch” and proceeded to take the database offline, supposedly “fixing” it.
As reported in The Epoch Times, the DOD claimed that the data in DMED was incorrect for the years 2016-2020, but the 2021 number was not affected. The corrected data saw the data for prior years increased, which made the 2021 data look normal.
After Long handed over the documents to DOD, it took officials 47 days to formulate a response to the data, only to explain it was a surprise to them.
Based on the previous DOD data, “the cluster of medical conditions represents a dramatic shift in the acuity of medical conditions we normally see,” said Long, noting that the data is “so catastrophic,” at the very least when those numbers came out, the military would reflexively pause everything and investigate.
“They didn’t pause anything and it took them [the DOD] a month to complete their sham investigation.” She said. “It’s a gross indictment and dereliction of duty.”
“We introduce a brand new drug into our very healthy population and the surveillance people aren’t even paying attention to their own $42 million-a-year system?” asked Long, who noted that during her 30 years in the Army, many of which she served as a doctor, she and other colleagues never heard of such a database provided by the system’s contractor Ussiant until 2019. “Don’t you think introducing a drug that was rushed to an entire fighting force would make it a top priority that the surveillance system is working?”
Long also asked why, if the DMED just had a “glitch” during the COVID pandemic, no one is being held accountable for this egregious medical surveillance system failure. Long’s attorney, Todd Callender, noted the DOD failed to produce a single expert IT witness that would testify under oath that the shocking data was just a “glitch.”
“So if the data was that alarming, why didn’t anyone in the Defense Health Agency (DHA) sound the alarm or catch the ‘glitch,’” she continued. “How did they not see this huge spike in serious medical problems?”
Another question arises as to why military doctors like Long have not received any communication regarding this spike in reportable events, which wasn’t just limited to pilots but also general officers and those in the Special Forces.
“I was notified to comb over our inventory after a risk management alert notification alerted me to two defective earplugs found at Fort Sill, Okla.” Long said, “But I can’t even get them to send out an alert saying ‘Hey your pilots might get myocarditis from the vaccine.’”
For this story, The Epoch Times reached out for comment from Director of Defense Lloyd J. Austin, the Office of the Surgeon General, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for comment.
‘I Can’t Un-see the Things I’ve Seen’
These new developments come as more physicians and patients have spoken out about a growing number of vaccine injuries while the science and research literature has simultaneously validated their claims and concerns.
Long said she was not only ignored but received threats against her career after speaking up. That’s because no action was taken on the part of military leaders to fully investigate the number and scope of adverse medical events that she, Sigoloff, Chambers, and Bashaw initially brought to their attention.
“When I found the DOD data, they pulled my credentials and took all my patients off my schedule,” said Long, noting that only left her more time to thoroughly look into the data.
While Long continues to add to her count of personally witnessed vaccine injuries, she also waits for a response from government officials with her latest filing.
Since she first came forward, she has also given testimony to the Idaho Legislature and at the Alaska Medical Freedom Symposium. Appearing recently on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight, she spoke about the FAA’s change in health requirements that significantly broaden the electrocardiogram range for pilots and allows those with cardiac injury damage to fly.
“In the light of emerging and overwhelming data showing cardiac damage from COVID and COVID vaccines on cardiac muscle, I can’t imagine why they would make this move and I think it’s a question that really should be taken to Dr. Susan Northrup, senior flight surgeon for the FAA,” Long told Carlson.
Stimulus spending played a “sizable role” in driving inflation to 40-year highs in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We find that excess inflation is significantly correlated to each country’s own domestic stimulus and to various exposures of foreign stimulus,” concluded a trio of economists at the St. Louis Federal Reserve in a report published last month. In the U.S., they found that “fiscal stimulus during the pandemic contributed to an increase in inflation of about 2.6 percentage points.”
That’s a significant increase, even if it doesn’t account for the full run-up of inflation that took place during the past 18 months. Price increases accelerated in late 2021 and throughout 2022, ultimately peaking at an annualized rate of 9.1 percent in June.
In the report, the three economists note that governments around the world responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by injecting large amounts of money into the economy via various mechanisms.
“The large increase in demand triggered by the fiscal stimulus policy, together with the slow pace of adjustment in production, likely contributed to the current imbalance in the goods market,” they wrote. The increase in demand as the world was still recovering from the blow that the pandemic dealt to production facilities and supply chains—and the disconnect between supply and demand—naturally forced prices to climb.
“Fiscal stimulus did not have any noticeable association with industrial production movements,” the three economists explain. “By stimulating demand without boosting supply, our results suggest that fiscal support contributed to increased excess demand pressures.”
The most obvious form of fiscal stimulus in the U.S. was the three rounds of direct payments mailed to most American households during the pandemic. About $823 billion was distributed in that manner, according to the COVID Money Tracker run by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonprofit that advocates for lower deficits.
The first round of stimulus checks was worth $1,200 per person and was approved as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act in March 2020. Another round of $600 checks was distributed starting in December of that year. But the big blow came in early 2021, when the Biden administration pushed through a round of $1,400 checks as part of the American Rescue Plan, passed by Congress in March 2021. Households earning as much as $160,000 in joint income were eligible for the final round of direct payments disbursed during the first half of 2021—and many progressives in Congress thought the cutoff should have been even higher.
The new report also seems to validate the concerns of some economists—including Larry Summers, one of the Obama administration’s top economic advisers, who warned that the American Rescue Plan “will set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation.”
After crunching the economic data from March 2020 through February 2022—a cut-off chosen to exclude any consequences from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which pushed some prices higher—the three Federal Reserve economists say they found a “potentially sizable role that fiscal policy may have played in contributing to upward price pressures.”
That’s somewhat at odds with the traditional view of inflation, which views the phenomenon as a function of monetary policy rather than fiscal policy.
But they argue that the two issues can become intermingled when the fiscal policy is fueled by government debt—that is, when fiscal stimulus is financed with borrowing rather than tax increases—because the “newly issued government debt is only partially backed by future taxes.”
Other recent reviews of COVID-era stimulus bills have come to a similar conclusion. In a paper published in September, economists at Johns Hopkins University and the Chicago Federal Reserve said “fiscal inflation” accounted for “approximately half” of the recent price increases.
That’s troubling, they added, because “fiscal inflation tends to be highly
persistent…When inflation has a fiscal nature, monetary policy alone may not provide an effective response.”
So far, the chief response to inflation has been a monetary one. The Federal Reserve has hiked interest rates—another hike in rates was approved this week—in an attempt to soak up the excess demand in the market. That seems to have tamed the soaring price increases seen in the first half of last year, but inflation is still running well ahead of the target annualized rate of 2 percent.
If fiscal policy contributed to higher prices, then it might require fiscal policy changes to bring them down as well.
Reckless borrowing and spending during the pandemic, it turns out, didn’t only cause the national debt to hit new highs. It also likely contributed to higher prices everywhere else.
How Fitting: An “Everything Rally” For Groundhog Day
By Michael Every of Rabobank
Where is Your Brain(ard)?
A simple Fed summary: rates were hiked 25bps to 4.75%, as expected; Fed Chair Powell floated *two* more such hikes, above what had been expected; and he made a stream of hawkish comments. However, he didn’t hammer home the point about loosening financial conditions much, and he noted disinflationary aspects to the economy.
The result? Another everything rally: lower bond yields, a weaker dollar, higher equities, mostly higher commodities, higher gold, and higher Bitcoin. As our Fed watcher Philip Marey put it, “Groundhog Day”.
The market is now pricing rate cuts this year and a slew to follow in 2024 despite the clear official message that the former at least is *not* going to happen. Philip generously notes Powell “sees the divergence between FOMC projections and the Fed Funds futures market rather as a difference in economic outlook than as disbelief in the Fed’s conditional prediction that given their outlook they are not going to cut rates this year.” It’s generous in that it overlooks that the market can’t forecast the economy either, and is disbelieving the Fed only because it means another bad year for assets, which it is fighting all the way to the bank.
It’s not that Powell didn’t suggest rates could come down. In fact, he said if CPI comes down faster than expected, which tweaking the base year of comparison to 2022 sure helps, it will play into policy. And, yes, BLS tweaky, tweaky, market-likey.
Crucially, however, Philip stresses “Powell does not see a sustainable decline to 2% inflation without balance in the labor market.” And what did we see yesterday in that regard? A solid, if weather-hit, ADP jobs print given how tight things already are; and US JOLTS job openings surging far more than the market had expected to over 11 million, such that there are now two job opening for every applicant. Tell me how this leads to much lower wage growth without a sudden U-turn towards a far more violent, far higher upwards shift in unemployment than the Fed is forecasting? And, let me add, the market too: they also expect a benign drift higher in unemployment as the median outcome – I told you they can’t forecast the economy and are just talking their own books.
Philip concludes,“we continue to think that the risk to our terminal rate forecast is predominantly to the upside. New exogenous supply shocks and the endogenous wage-price spiral could push the Fed even further than they now anticipate. Note that our concern about the wage-price spiral would particularly affect core services ex-housing inflation, the only place where disinflation is not visible yet according to Powell. Unfortunately, if wage growth is going to persist at elevated levels, that extra 25bps in May the FOMC is now thinking of may not be enough. If core services ex -housing inflation is going to remain high, it could require an extra shock to the labour market that will take the top of the target range to 5.5% or even 6.0%, instead of the 5.0% that we have in mind or the 5.25% that the FOMC has pencilled in.”
In short, if the market is acutely self-serving rather than accurately forecasting geopolitics and the economy, it risks getting a 6% Fed Funds rate ahead.
Where is your brain if you can’t see that, as well as the downside risks to the US economy if we get the kind of labor-market weakness that justifies what the bond market is now doing?
Philip also notes “press reports suggest that Fed Vice Chair Lael Brainard may be moving to the National Economic Council soon. This could weaken the dovish faction in the FOMC, which just gained strength this year in terms of voting rights. However, it cannot be ruled out that President Biden nominates another dove to replace her.”
Where is your Brain(ard) if you can’t see such Kremlinology is worth paying as much attention as actual Kremlinology and Politburology, and a very big dove may be on the way out?
The latter two ‘ologies’ also have more of an impact on the Fed than dovish market brains want to see, as Philip alludes to. Relatedly, Branko Milanovic today refers to recent musings by Adam Tooze on the troubling-loose definition of polycrisis (which in early 2022 I had called a metacrisis), geoeconomic fragmentation, friend-shoring, and ‘slowbalisation’, etc., vs. the view of this as all being ‘just history’: “More fundamentally, one could say that the problem @adam_tooze identifies is due to the lack of any conceptual framework within which to situate the current developments. If you have no framework, you just see a bunch of weird events…The guy who first comes with the framework which is not just the two hyphenated terms, or two words slapped together will win.”
As I argued in 2020, we need a new, ‘next normal’ ideological “-ism” for politicians –then central banks– to hang their hats on.
Where is the brain that will provide it? I don’t know – but it won’t come from markets.
Of course, it is pretty unlikely that it will come from central banks either.
