Jared Bernstein is perhaps the most influential "economist" in the United States.
I put economist in quotes, despite his being an academic who has taught the subject and has advised Congress and the highest elected officials in America. I do so because he is a moron. He is such a moron that Paul Krugman himself admires him for his economic insights.
He is that bad.
This is absolutely priceless. And probably the most frightening clip you'll ever watch on the people in charge of the US economy.
— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) May 3, 2024
Jared Bernstein is literally the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, the main agency advising Biden on economic policypic.twitter.com/1b31FPFPCQ
If you watch this video, you will see what I mean. He literally does not know the most basic things about government finance despite being an acknowledged "expert" on the subject. He has the same grasp of basic economics as a third grader. The clip is from a documentary called "Finding the Money." I have not watched the full documentary so I cannot recommend it or not.
It's hard to think of much to say beyond the obvious. Knowing that he helped manage the economic policies of the Obama and Biden administrations explains why they have been such monumental failures.
It is certainly true that the government prints money, but the more money the government prints the less valuable the money becomes. In order to maintain the value of money it needs to be connected to the real value of the goods and services produced in the economy or to a commodity, such as gold, that people value independent of the pieces of paper (or digital bits) that get "printed."
If the money supply expands faster than the real value of the goods and services inflation explodes. Period. End of story. There is no magic money machine, and never will be.
This is the reality of fiat currency. It is also why inflation is caused by excessive money printing.
Money in Zimbabwe doesn't exist anymore, at least as a trusted means of exchange. Shopkeepers exchange handwritten pieces of paper that are essentially IOUs. You can use US dollars, but since there isn't enough change, they give these IOUs to customers as credits for future purchases.
HARARE, Zimbabwe—On a recent afternoon, Rutendo Manyowa handed over a U.S. $5 bill to pay for her $3.50 order of chicken, fries and a soft drink at a popular fast-food joint in the Zimbabwean capital. But instead of a $1 bill and two quarters in change, the cashier handed Ms. Manyowa three slips of paper, bearing the restaurant’s name and the amount of money she could use to buy her next meal.
Zimbabwe, the country that brought the world the one-hundred-trillion-dollar bill, has reached a new stage of monetary dysfunction. Because of a lack of small change, businesses have started printing their own “money”—scraps of paper, sometimes handwritten, that customers can use to pay for future purchases. Others are handing out change in-kind, making customers whole with juice boxes, pens or slices of cheese.
The paper chits and other pecuniary workarounds are the latest products of two decades of extreme mismanagement of Zimbabwe’s currency.
That is what happens when you print too much money. At one point inflation was so high that it reached 79.6 billion percent.
You read that right.
Jared Bernstein, the chairman of Biden's Council of Economic Advisors and hence one of the most powerful men in the world DOES NOT KNOW THIS.
What else is there to say? If Biden gets reelected we are doomed. Game over.
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