TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA — While Governor Ron DeSantis has largely remained silent amidst attacks from former president Donald Trump, the governor has been vocal about economic policies affecting Floridians and the entire nation.
On Saturday, at an appearance in Harrisburg, PA, DeSantis said no one has done more to create inflation than Joe Biden – except “maybe Jerome Powell.”
A JAB AT DONALD TRUMP?
During his book tour last week in Atlanta, DeSantis made an implied jab at former President Trump who nominated Powell for the central bank chairman position in 2017. According to DeSantis, the Fed contributed to higher inflation after it “printed trillions and trillions of dollars.”
“This Fed chairman has been a total and complete disaster,” DeSantis told supporters. “And you are paying for it, and people all across this country are paying for it.”
INFLATIONARY PRESSURES
“That obviously is going to create inflationary pressures,” DeSantis said at a press conference last week in Naples. “And so people were saying this, that this was always going to happen. They didn’t want to listen. And so you had inflation start to percolate.”
DeSantis slammed Powell for portraying fast-approaching inflation as “transitory” before finally acting in hindsight. Powell’s “horrible job over the last few years” contributed to significant turmoil in the economy according to the governor.
“So then what does the Fed do?” DeSantis asked. “Jerome Powell, they start hiking rates very rapidly. And that’s causing dislocations in the banking sector. It’s causing individuals to suffer just because they took their eye off the ball and didn’t know what they were doing.”
AN OMEN IGNORED
In 2021, the President of the Federal Reserve regional bank in Kansas, Thomas Hoenig, warned that current U.S. economic policies would draw the Federal Reserve into an inescapable money-printing quagmire that would likely destabilize the entire financial system.
“There is no painless solution,” Hoenig told Politico in a 2021 interview. “It’s going to be difficult. And the longer you wait, the more painful it will end up being.”
After the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, the FDIC, Treasury Department and Federal Reserve temporarily lifted the $250,000 cap in protection for deposits made at Silicon Valley Bank. The move was not a “bailout” according to the federal government, because the Fed pulled extra cash from an insurance fund paid for by other banks.
But DeSantis called the move “fundamentally unfair” and said because of it inflation would worsen nationwide.
“The other thing they’ve done in the process of bailing out the handful of banks that they have, they’ve printed another three, four hundred billion and put it back into the economy,” DeSantis said.
“They spent all last year trying to take money out, trying to get inflation under control, and they just now printed, wiping away half of what they’ve already taken out in the last year.”
