John Carney - Finance / Economics Editor, Breitbart Joins Houston's Morning News

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Oh, I think the tariffs have worked very well. Thank
you very much. Seven twenty three is our time here
in Houston's Morning News. We're joined by John Carney from Breitbart's.
He is all about finance, he's all about economics. He's
their economics and finance editor. By the way, there's a
story that he wrote for Breitbart on one hundred and

(00:20):
fifty years of evidence showing that tariffs, unlike what evidently
the head of the FED thinks, tariffs don't add to inflation,
they actually lower inflation. Why is that, John, So, what.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
They did is they looked through what happened after countries
raised tariffs beginning in eighteen seventy and they looked in
the UK, the US, and France. What they found is
inflation actually falls and there is a rise. Also, it's
not all good news in all things economics. There are
trade offs. It's actually there's a riset unemployment and there

(00:56):
is a decline in inflation, which is very different from
what economists have been predicting for a long time. Right,
exactly why this happens is not clear, and the paper
is actually very clear about this point. That's something they
need to do for the research on this is a
result that's unexpected. It's not what they've been telling us

(01:17):
would be the case, and so they need to figure
out exactly why this happens. But right now what they
have is just you know, one hundred and fifty years
of history showing what does happen. Now, we've got to
figure out the mechanism.

Speaker 1 (01:30):
Well, the best indicator of the future is what's happened
in the past, and that being the case, do you
think the FED takes a look at this study and
maybe says, Okay, we've been going about this all wrong.
We've been worried about inflation connected to these tariffs. We
need to look at it the opposite way and tackle
the unemployment problem instead, because we are seeing an uptick
in unemployment and lower rates even further.

Speaker 2 (01:52):
That's right, that's what they should be doing. Whether they
will or not, we'll see. I bet that Jerome Powell,
the fed's next meeting is in December. I bet that
when Jerome Powell holds his press conference, at least one
reporter is going to ask him about this report. It
has been, you know, very widely circulated. All the people

(02:15):
who write about the FED and are in those meetings. Uh,
definitely know about it. It comes out of the San
Francisco Federal Reserve, and I think that's important. This didn't
emerge from, you know, some sort of you know, the
Trump White House or some pro Trump, you know economists.
It emerged from one of the most unexpected places you

(02:39):
could And I have to give credit to the economists
for going ahead and publishing their work. There's a problem
in social sciences where when economists, anthropologists that really any
psychologists come across a finding that they don't like, it
goes into a desk drawer and never sees the light

(02:59):
of day. Here, they actually said, okay, this is unexpected,
it's not what we would have, you know, what we
set out to show when we did this study. But
it's still very significant. So they went ahead and published it.
So good for them.

Speaker 1 (03:12):
Yeah, that's that's it's a rare thing these days. Thank you, sir,
appreciated John Carney, financing economics editor at Breitbart