{"id":39265,"date":"2018-10-17T06:41:00","date_gmt":"2018-10-17T11:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=39265"},"modified":"2018-10-17T06:41:00","modified_gmt":"2018-10-17T11:41:00","slug":"agents-of-chaos-trump-the-federal-reserve-and-andrew-jackson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=39265","title":{"rendered":"Agents of Chaos: Trump, the Federal Reserve and Andrew Jackson"},"content":{"rendered":"

Agents of Chaos: Trump, the Federal Reserve and Andrew Jackson<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Photo Source Eli Christman | CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cIt is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013 President Andrew Jackson, Washington, July 10, 1832<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

They are three players, all problematic in their own way.\u00a0 They are the creatures of inconvenient chaos.\u00a0 Donald Trump was born into the role, a misfit of misrule who found his baffling way to the White House on a grievance.\u00a0 Wall Street, with its various agglomerations of vice and ambition constitute the spear of global instability while the US Federal Reserve, long seen as a gentlemanly symbol of stability, has done its fair share to avoid its remit to right unstable ships, a power in its own right.<\/p>\n

The Federal Reserve, despite assuming the role of Apollonian stabiliser, remained blind and indifferent through the Clinton era under the stewardship of Alan Greenspan.\u00a0 The creatures of Dionysus played, and Greenspan was happy to watch.\u00a0While he is credited with having contained the shock of the 1987 stock-market crash, he proceeded to push a period of manically low interest rates and minimal financial regulation through the hot growth of the 1990s and early 2000s. Rather than condemning \u201cNinja loans\u201d and other such bank exotica, he celebrated them as creations of speculative genius.<\/p>\n

The mood at the Fed these days might seems chastened.\u00a0 They are the monkish wowsers and party poopers, those who lock down the bar and tell the merrily sauced to head home.\u00a0 The sense there is that the market, boosted and inflated, needs correction after years of keeping interest rates at floor levels. Unemployment levels are at 3.7 percent; inflation levels are close to 2 percent.\u00a0 \u201cIf the strong growth in income and jobs continues,\u201d reasoned<\/a> Federal Reserve chairman Jerome H. Powell in August, \u201cfurther gradual increases in the target range for the federal funds rate will likely be appropriate.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Agents of Chaos: Trump, the Federal Reserve and Andrew Jackson Photo Source Eli Christman | CC BY 2.0 \u201cIt is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.\u201d \u2013 President Andrew Jackson, Washington, July 10, 1832 They are three players, all problematic in their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6],"tags":[952,22356,15948,4075,5493,7844,303,22357,16888,2731,3650,860],"class_list":["post-39265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-liberty","tag-alan-greenspan","tag-andrew-jackson","tag-binoy-kampmark","tag-chaos","tag-counterpunch","tag-donald-trump","tag-fed","tag-financial-regulation","tag-jerome-powell","tag-stock-market-crash","tag-us-federal-reserve","tag-wall-street"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39265"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39265\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39266,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39265\/revisions\/39266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}