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Extremely moderate?
He’s 10x illegal immigrations.
He’s executive ordered a welfare state for excessive college debt.
Caused the greatest inflation from excessive spending since Jimmy Carter.
Invited naked Trans people to the White House lawn.
I mean rhetorically I can say things like what did Trump do wrong he’s been extremely moderate. He’s mostly just done GOP type things like cut taxes and appoint Pro-Life judges.
I’ve got no clue on what you mean by fact-free conspiracies. Most of those have ended up being true. They went a little too far anti-vax.
And clothed non-binary suitcase thieves to the Department of Energy. Well, one.
In fairness, based on how poorly his outfits matched, he probably was naked before he stole all those suitcases and wore whatever he found in random women's luggage to a reception at the French embassy.
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To be fair to Joe, I think that was more whatever munchkins there are in the administration are responsible for that, and he just showed up for the photoshoot with visitors as Mr. President. I can't see him having a list of "trans strippers I'd like to invite to cavort on the White House lawn" (Hunter maybe, but not Joe).
We're not hearing too much these days about trans non-binary queer folx in the Department of Whatever. Maybe they're still there, but they're a heck of a lot quieter since the unfortunate luggage misplacement incidents.
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...wouldn't a large part of that be Trump-era Covid spending, though?
This case?
No, inflation expectations across every horizon remained low in 2020 and only really started to go up after Biden's spending spree got off the starting line in 2021. Remember Larry Summers being pilloried for pointing out that the ARPA spent more stimulative dollars than the size of the output gap by a large amount at that time?
The early Biden administration's spending explosion stimulated the economy enough that the Fed's late 2021 plans to start tightening became very out of date for the actual state of the economy. If they had tightened earlier (so, March-April 2021), there might have been no serious inflation but there also might not have been any serious inflation if Republicans had kept the Senate or the White House and not passed the huge spending bills of that year.
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Yes. The one truly awful set of policies that Trump had were the ones where he decided to trust the experts that are pretty much all left-aligned.
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The incredible growth in M1 happened under Trump.
Don’t really want to redebate these issues. Mostly just wanted a little rebuttal to “Biden was moderate” which both sides claim of their guy.
Fwiw though I don’t M’s do a very good job predicting inflation. Part of this is IOER and other plumbing by the Fed that sterilizes a lot of the production of the M’s created by the Fed.
I don't reasonably see any way to handwave and say that quadrupling the money supply would have no effect on inflation. That seems like one of those things you can only believe after a lot of education.
If that weren't enough, the biggest budget deficit in a hundred years was under Trump, not Biden. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFSD
If you don't want to redebate the issues you shouldn't make claims that are at odds with easily observable reality.
The Democrats consistently pushed for higher spending and tighter pandemic restrictions and were opposed by the Republicans. Biden mostly benefited from taking office after the worst was over. Biden also wanted to do students loan forgiveness but was stopped by a conservative court. Trump is certainly not a budget hawk but I don't think it tells the whole story to just look at results without taking into account the circumstances of when they happened.
It's crazy to blame inflation on Biden when the deficit and money printing happened under Trump, and justify it with a Biden policy that never happened.
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My claims are inline with the economics profession. Bob Elliot had this exact debate on twitter a few months ago and no one though the M’s were predictive.
Also if you look at them we should be having a large amount of deflation right now. Which is obviously false.
And obviously we should have had hyperinflation at some point in the past.
Like I said, a lot of education.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that printing money and deficit spending happened most under Trump. If you don't think either of those cause inflation i don't know what to say.
Does a thought requiring a lot of education or expertise mean that the thought is therefore false?
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For those not familiar, I just want to link this out, because it is genuinely one of the most unhinged graphs you will ever see.
I'd like to see one that shows the pre-May-2020-definition and post-May-2020-definition versions of M1 as two separate lines. With this graph it's hard to tell how much growth is money printing, how much is savings pattern changes, and how much is just semantics. There's just a big gasp when you first see the big May 2020 jump, followed by a big meh when you read the "that part was all just semantics" fine print afterwards.
The FAQ page includes the chart you asked for (up to December 2020), which shows there was a pretty big jump in early 2020, but nowhere near as large as it looks on the official chart (i.e. around 2x instead of around 10x).
That's exactly what I was looking for; thank you!
2x is still more than I'd have guessed based on subsequent inflation (or M2 data, which seems to be applies-to-apples) alone. I wonder to what extent that means the Fed was partly fighting a natural permanent fall in the velocity of money, vs to what extent it means we still have more future inflation "baked in", vs to what extent it means I don't understand macroeconomics. Probably around 3%/2%/95%...
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