Dedicated readers will remember that, during the heady days following President Donald Trump’s shocking electoral triumph in November 2016, Steve Bannon gave the first of many unauthorized and wide-ranging interviews to the Hollywood Reporter’s Michael Wolff (a decision that would famously come back to haunt him) where he declared that he was “not a conservative” and that, as a nationalist, he wanted interest rates to stay low, and for the US to “get everything all jacked up” with a massive infrastructure spending plan that, ironically, the White House is only now getting behind.
With this in mind, it shouldn’t come as a big surprise that in comments published in the introduction to a new book “Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Nationalist Uprising”, the former White House chief strategist and nationalist standard-bearer revealed that he urged Trump to reappoint former Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen – and stick with decades of precedent whereby the incoming administration keeps the previous Fed chair – but kept his mouth shut has Trump passed her over in favor of Republican Jerome Powell.
“The Breitbart posse is in love with Janet Yellen. If we get behind her, that is the signal of signals — the realignment of American politics, ” Bannon told the book’s author, Bloomberg’s Joshua Green, in September, several months before he stepped down from the conservative media outlet. “Yellen’s my girl.”
Bannon didn’t endorse Yellen, and Trump picked Powell, a Fed governor since 2012 who is expected to stick with his predecessors’ policy of raising interest rates only gradually. Unlike his predecessor, Powell has so far been reluctant to step in with a “Powell put” to calm the market turmoil that has coincided with the beginning of his term.
As Bloomberg points out, Yellen oversaw a steep drop in the US unemployment rate to the lowest level since 2000 while failing to boost wages prompting many to ask if the Phillips Curve is dead. Still, she didn’t mask her disappointment about not being reappointed, telling PBS during an interview on her last day in office (as the Dow plunged more than 1000 points) that she was “disappointed” not to be reappointed, and that she would’ve liked to serve another term.
Bannon, meanwhile, was unceremoniously booted from Breitbart because of comments he allegedly made to Wolff, which were published in “Fire and Fury” roughly a year after his initial interview.
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/2EFe5PS Tyler Durden