{"id":187295,"date":"2025-12-16T23:34:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-16T23:34:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/187295\/"},"modified":"2025-12-16T23:34:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-16T23:34:07","slug":"ken-griffins-warning-on-the-affordability-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/187295\/","title":{"rendered":"Ken Griffin\u2019s Warning on the Affordability Crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"

Will unchecked inflation cost the GOP control of Congress in the midterms? That\u2019s the concern mooted this morning by a hedge fund billionaire, Ken Griffin, a Republican donor. \u201cIt\u2019s quite ironic to see how the tables are turned,\u201d Mr. Griffin asserts<\/a>, \u201cbecause just 12 months ago, President Trump and the Republicans swept into office on the issue of inflation.\u201d Yet he reckons \u201cthe Democrats have rebranded the problem of inflation as the issue of affordability.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hence the need, as these columns have warned, for Mr. Trump to embrace honest money to quell higher prices. As it stands, per Mr. Griffin, the Democrats are \u201cpoised to return to control the House,\u201d and even the Senate, signaling \u201chow the affordability issue strikes a chord.\u201d He argues that consumers are \u201ctired of the persistent and sticky inflation.\u201d Mr. Trump\u2019s deregulatory drive will eventually yield higher growth, Mr. Griffin adds, but inflation is pressing now.<\/p>\n

Mr. Trump is justified in blaming his predecessor for much of the inflation predicament. Prices rose some 20 percent during President Biden\u2019s tenure in the White House. Yet while the pace of price increases has slowed, costs have not retreated<\/a> to their levels before the Biden inflation spiral. That, Mr. Griffin avers, leads Americans to \u201cfeel like they can\u2019t get ahead in a world where their savings and their wages are constantly deprecated by the impact of inflation.\u201d<\/p>\n

It reflects the White House\u2019s increasing awareness of the political peril posed by price increases that Vice President Vance today took up this issue on the hustings. The idea, per Politico, was \u201cto turn the tables on Democrats for their outcry over the affordability crisis.\u201d Mr. Vance rates the economy \u201cA-plus-plus-plus,\u201d and as for any griping by Democrats over affordability, he said: \u201cyou know what? They\u2019re right \u2014 and it was because of them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Vance is not wrong to decry the Biden-Harris administration\u2019s agenda of federal overspending, over-regulating, and over-taxing for helping to trigger, then fuel, the inflationary wave<\/a>. The Federal Reserve\u2019s bloated balance sheet, the result of the central bank\u2019s experimental Quantitative Easing program, is part of the problem too. Yet the monetary roots of the inflation \u2014 and affordability \u2014 crisis cannot be ignored, either.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s because the tendency of prices to ratchet ever higher, and not subsequently to decline, is a feature of the fiat money system. That regime has prevailed in America since the abandonment of the gold standard. When the dollar was convertible into specie \u2014 meaning gold or silver \u2014 at a fixed weight set by law, prices held steady over the long run. When prices rose, as during wartime, the discipline of convertibility meant that they soon fell back.\u00a0<\/p>\n

An honest dollar helped fuel America\u2019s rise to global economic predominance while keeping prices on an even keel. Between 1790 and 1913, the annual average inflation rate was but 0.2 percent<\/a>, economists William Luther and Alexander William Salter have reported. Today\u2019s surge in prices is accompanied by a plunge in the dollar\u2019s gold value. Today a greenback fetches less than a 4,300th of a gold ounce, versus a 35th of an ounce before Bretton Woods\u2019 end.<\/p>\n

Which brings us back to Mr. Griffin\u2019s warning. Mr. Griffin contends that Mr. Trump\u2019s agenda will, in the long run, help to improve affordability. Deregulation, he says, \u201cshould unleash productivity gains,\u201d and bring \u201ca very healthy reduction\u201d in inflation. We need \u201cto get to that point in time,\u201d he cautions. In our view the collapse of the dollar is at the root of the affordability crisis. When will the GOP take to the voters the failure of fiat money?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Will unchecked inflation cost the GOP control of Congress in the midterms? That\u2019s the concern mooted this morning…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":187296,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[138,219,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-187295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187295"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187295\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/187296"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}