Alright folks, joining me now on a monitoring macros. C.I.O. C.I.O. Joseph Wang. Joe, you know, I always find myself asking economists and Wall Street types if they have any relatives in a middle class or lower middle class because it does always kind of seem to be a disconnect. I always, the Wall Street guys are always sort of, it's good. The economy is strong and then, you know, everyone, all my relatives are like, it's tough. I'm struggling, Charles. Do you ever see that disconnect at all? Well, absolutely, Charles, first of all, thank you for having me. And I think this is especially salient. Now I can talk from my experience at the Fed. So the Fed, as you know, has to make decisions so they go and they gather information. My sense is that when the Fed talks to people, they're talking to C.I.O.s, they're talking to treasures, they're talking to big investors. Basically, they're talking to really wealthy people and so they're kind of taking their perspective more when they go and make decisions. And I think that's similar to many of the economists that you would speak to as well. This is huge, I guess, sample selection where the people we hear on who make decisions in public institutions and on Wall Street tend to not know very many middle-class people. And so you get a very skewed perspective as to how things are going and that impacts policy as well. There should be mandatory trips to the local supermarket twice a month, I think. Just mandatory.
Alright. You've got a great tweet. Well, it's very compelling. And I want to share it with the audience. People spending redistributes income from those who spend less to those who spend more. The effect may be particularly strong when spending is financed by debt than taxes. This suggests continued strong growth and nominal GDP in support of credit. I don't know. Am I reading this right? It sounds like you're saying that maybe a form of monetary theory is working and we should stick with it. Well, Charles, as you know, a couple years ago, we basically experimented with massive MMT. We're spending free money to basically millions of people. What people may not be aware of, though, is we kind of didn't really stop. Now we don't send overt checks, but if you look at the fiscal deficit, it's 5% a year. And according to the CBO, it's going to stay about 5% a year for the foreseeable future. Now the CBO is a great organization, but they can only make projections based on current law. If the past is any guidance, we're going to be spending more and more money. So that 5% fiscal deficit is going to be an underestimation. So in a sense, the federal government is going to spend tremendous amounts of money and pay for it by printing trade or securities. In a sense, it's very much like printing money. And this completely changes the game when it comes to economic growth and when it comes to asset prices. So this strong nominal growth we've seen, how the economy seems to be so resilient, even after the Fed hikes rates, I think a lot of it is due to this tremendous fiscal spending. Would you advocate then to make that a permanent feature? Or would you be concerned that inflation would never really go away and that the better, what do we want? Do we want nominal growth at any cost? Because it seems that the longer we do this, the bigger the larger the reckoning is going to be.
Absolutely, Charles. So if you look across the world, let's say, can Argentina do something like this? Can Brazil do something like this? Absolutely not. If they were to have these tremendous deficits, well, their bond market would freak out and their currency would be selling off significantly. It's kind of already happening in some cases. What makes the US different is that we've built up so much credibility over the past hundred years as the world superpar, that even though we are not being physically well managed, there seems to be a lot of people who still just piling into the bond market, piling into the dollar. Now these perceptions take a while to change, but obviously it's not sustainable and that's true. Paul has already noted there's a lot of people who are ringing the alarm bells on our fiscal situation. It is not sustainable. Just like it takes a long time to build it up, once you lose it, it would take a long time to regain it. Joe, thank you very much. Really appreciate it. Folks, you got to check out the Fed guy on Twitter.