David Rosenberg: Fed Will Embrace ‘Helicopter Money’ In The Next Few Years
Jerome Powell has denounced MMT has “just wrong”, but many Wall Street luminaries have surprisingly communicated an openness to the proposal. Most recently Ray Dalio proposed a marriage of monetary and fiscal policy that sounded suspiciously similar to MMT. Bill Gross, once a vocal critic of the Federal Reserve’s stimulus program, told Bloomberg shortly after he retired from managing outside money that higher taxes and the advent of MMT might be ‘necessary evils’ to combat the widening economic gap between the rich and the poor.
MMT has been perhaps the most widely discussed topic in the realm of economics since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposed it as a possible mechanism for financing her ‘revolutionary’ Green New Deal. But this past week, President Trump’s exhortation that the Federal Reserve usher in QE4 by cutting interest rates stoked a frenzy of speculation that the world’s most powerful central bank might be closer to outright debt monetization – aka ‘helicopter money’ – than mainstream economists had realized. Of course, debt monetization is a central plank of the MMT program.
But just days before Trump made his now-infamous QE4 comment, Gluskin Sheff chief economist David Rosenberg offered a prediction during an interview with MacroVoice’s Erik Townsend that, in retrospect, seems surprisingly prescient.
David Rosenberg
During a discussion about how the Fed ‘pause’ impacted Sheff’s monetary policy outlook, Rosenberg, a frequent guest on CNBC, declared that, instead of giving QE another try, the central bank would opt for something even more radical by embracing MMT. And not without good reason. Just because the Fed is ostensibly insulated from political considerations, doesn’t mean it’s not obligated to protect its credibility.
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