What the Latest From Jay Powell Means for YOU

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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Jay Powell show. At least that’s what the financial press is telling you. Jay Powell, last night, 60 minutes, about 13, 14 minute interview covering a few topics here and there, one of them being, hey, when you planning on lowering rates, Jay? Scott Pelley was doing the interviewing and you know, ask him, well, you know, inflation’s come down, why aren’t you lowering rates? Well,

He said there’s concern of maybe slowing the pace of inflation’s decline. Um, I don’t know, could be, um, financial press today is, oh my God, the markets are down because of Jay Powell’s interview. Um, no, uh, he didn’t say anything in the interview yesterday that was anything different from last week.

And again, this is part of the problem is that they try to put their finger on why things are happening. The reason why stocks are down, quite frankly, is because there’s more selling pressure than buying pressure. It happens. It is what it is. They got to got to find an answer. Oh, we have no blame, J. Pop. No, no. McDonald’s numbers weren’t that great. Markets may have gotten ahead of themselves to some degree.

But no, it’s a place to blame on Jay Powell. Maybe some algorithmic trading, whenever he opens up his mouth, there’s some computer somewhere that’s trying to analyze what he has to say. Most important thing from Jay Powell’s show last night on 60 Minutes, Jay Powell’s show, the US is on an unsustainable fiscal path. And we’ll give Jay Powell the Master of the Obvious Award for that.

Again, beating the same drum that we tend to beat here on the podcast on a regular basis. Debt is growing fast in the economy, so it’s unsustainable. Again, we’re looking at numbers right now that are patently absurd. There’s gonna be a point in time with the next 10 years where it’s going to, you know, it’s gonna be almost a million dollars for every household here in this country. That’s a reality.

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That’s reality. And again, the people in Washington, D.C., don’t want to deal with it. It’s unfortunate because he actually said, we make it a habit not to comment on Congress and what Congress is doing. He said that, you know, Congress is basically they oversee what we do. Again, I would disagree with Jay Paul with that. Paul Volcker had no problem whatsoever. No problem whatsoever.

going after government and government spending. That’s what we need now. You’re the chairman of the Federal Reserve, you got what, you got what, two years left on his term. Donald Trump interviewed with Maria Bartiromo, said that he’s probably not going to keep him on, thinks that Jay Powell’s gonna lower rates because it’s political. Come on, I don’t know.

I don’t know quite frankly, I guess it gives Donald Trump, you know, finger to point or to blame if, you know, it gets people happy that rates have come down and mortgages have gotten cheaper. I get that. But you know, they screwed up royally. And that’s the reality. If you’re going to go back, you take a look at Jay Powell’s tenure, Scott Pelly kind of gave him a big fat, huge trophy for getting inflation.

down without putting tons of people out of work. Well, again, if you believe the jobs numbers which are nonsensical. They are, they’re nonsensical. Again, I think I covered this last week. Do you know that the hourly work week right now is at the lows of COVID? We’re at the same level. That’s how few hours people are working a week. That sounds like a b****.

vibrant jobs market every single time I turn around and other companies laying off 10% of their workforce. So I’m not buying into that nonsense at all. And again, even the when you talk about inflation, and I got to give credit to Alyssa Finley from the Wall Street Journal, very good columnist there writes in their editorial pages and points out

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something and I was like, you know, kind of like a eureka moment. Man, she’s right. I didn’t really think about that, quite frankly. And I’m not, she talks about shrinkflation and I’m just talking about the size of, you know, less potato chips in the bag at the grocery store. It’s everywhere. It’s everywhere. And she brings up something because, again, I’m on planes a lot. Take airline

which the Labor Department’s Consumer Price Index shows fell 9.4% during 2023. That sounds nice until you consider that the calculation weighs the lowest available fare for a trip, which is offered by who? Budget Airlines. Oh, yeah, the spirits, the frontiers of the world. It’s a true story. Had to go down to Florida. Looked at.

prices a couple of weeks ago and trust me, I’d much rather leave from the airport closest to my house here, I slip. So I looked up Frontier and I was like, holy snaggies. I was like, babe, look at this round trip. It’s like a hundred bucks. It wasn’t a hundred bucks. When all was said and done from bringing on your carry on to a piece of luggage, it was closer to 800 bucks.

And again, the calculations say, oh, no, look at how cheap that is. Right. Not to mention the fact even, you know, if you want an aisle seat, you got to pay 50 bucks more. It’s just it’s crazy. It really is. But again, the numbers don’t calculate that. They also don’t calculate what’s going on with things we use every day. The streaming services, for example. Yeah, they will they will take the lowest.

Price, which is again, if you want to watch the commercials, they’re not considering the price increases for the other services as well. Auto insurance rates up 20% over the last year.

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then why does the CPI show that health insurance prices dropped 27% since December of 2022, which is a joke. They calculate health insurance inflation using some method that relies on retained insurer earnings as a proxy for prices. Again, nonsensical, this is the problem, is what people are paying for every day, I call it the bare necessities when it comes to inflation. Then even Jay Powell on the Jay Powell show last night.

say, well, you know, stuff linked to commodities here and there, they may come down a little bit, but he doesn’t really see prices dropping. Shocker. Again, middle of the year, lowering rates? Probably. But again, I want to remind everybody, if your portfolio hinges on what Jay Powell is going to say in a 60 minutes interview, or how some algorithm is going to translate, what he says, you’re doing the wrong thing. Watchdog on wallstreet.com.