3:22. To get to the book to the heart of it Donald Trump is not a conservative in any way shape or form economically.

WOODS.  If I were to pick Trump out and say he's no good on these issues the whole Republican party is bad on these issues and even if you bring out a Paul Ryan well the difference between Paul Ryan and Trump is Ryan wants to hire commission to look at into it and then they'll ignore it with the commission said I don't think Trump is alone in this

4:30.  I agree with you and unfortunately, the Republican Party in the last half-decade has drifted further and further away from the fundamentals of fiscal rectitude but partly because it has been "Trumpified."  Trump insisted stoutly while he was in office for 4 years that they were going to touch Social Security that was a half-hearted effort and didn't pan out and no political capital was really spent, but since then he's become even more militant on insisting that those huge entitlements, the whole transfer payment budget, is sacrosanct.  If he is renominated and the Republican Party is led by Trump again for the next 4 years, I think it's all over except for the shouting.

5:34. Any voices in the party that might want to face these fiscal facts have been totally smothered.  You remember when they passed a huge CARES Act sight unseen in March 2020 after the lockdowns were proposed, it was 2.2 trillion dollars.  No one even read 180 pages.  The one guy who opposed it was the congressman from Kentucky, Thomas Massie.  He got denounced and shouted down by Trump and Trump even demanded that he be purged from the Republican Party so that's what we're up against but I agree with you without Trump we still have a real battle in front of us but at least there's some hope the Republican Party can come back to its senses.

6:32. Let's dig into some statistics.  The problem is that the Republican base doesn't seem to have much interest in this you know they say they do but I don't think they do.  For example, the TEA Party was a brief flash in the pan, but even they were willing to make the kinds of cuts that would be necessary.  I highly doubt it. It's easy to go after work leftist or ANTIFA criminals or whatever because everybody understands how crazy that is but people like getting checks in the mail with their names on them and that's a very very hard addiction to break.

7:26. I agree with you and the worst episode of that was the so-called Stimi's in response to the lockdown in which everyone got a check except maybe the top 10% of households up to $150,000 we're getting those steamy checks of $1,200, $1,400, 500 for the kids.  After that first act during the summer and fall of 2020, if you were a family of 4 with two wage earners and got laid off, you got all the stimmy checks in child care credits; you were all so eligible for the unemployment topper on top of which was a $1,000 a week; on top of the state benefits, it could add up to $30k, $40k, even $50,000 a year of handouts from the government.  That happened on Trump's watch he signed it it was the worst excess of that thing that we've encountered yet and it's another reason why I think he's already prove he's not even remotely the right person for the job.

8:50. So what you're doing in this book in part is going through the Trump record and arguing that it was not all it was cracked up to be in terms of economic performance.  . . . Even though the President doesn't really have that much control over monetary policy, the president does nominate someone for Fed chair, and I would like for  the president to be sensible enough to choose a decent enough Fed Chair.  I mean I'd be very very happy if Jim Grant were chosen to be Fed Chairman because maybe something might happen.  But no president has actually been serious about making the dollar worth something again and keep an eye on rising prices and really crack down, I don't know of anybody.  So are we being unfair to Trump?

10:10. I don't think we are because these subsequent presidents you don't like Reagan was a pretty stout Defender of what the said needed to do and what Volker was doing to bring down that double digit inflation we've inherited and the other Republican politicians around him in the white house and on Capitol Hill we're constantly pushing you've got to tell Volker to take his foot off the neck on the economy Howard baker said that but he really didn't yield and after Volker one he should have been reappointed in 1987.  Stockman convinced Reagan that volcker wasn't reliable and Alan Greenspan would make a wonderful replacement.  The presidents since then, the Bushes, have been lukewarm tap it on the monetary issue they didn't demand that the FED open up the spigot and print money like there was no tomorrow but they didn't demand a solid money or sound money policy either the problem is when Trump got in he leaned way the other way he was constantly on the case going after interest rates which were about zero effectively when he got there and the belated efforts of the FED tried to get interest rates moving back into some semblance of rationality he constantly thwarted and opposed now this is important in 2017 after we were well after the Great Recession sort of conservative/ Keynesian Friedman Heights that had dominated the Republican Party always believed that when you got into the middle and back into the business cycle to sober up should be to be to get back to Market rates of Interest to get the budget balanced even a surplus Trump went the other way when they tried as you remember to begin raising interest rates and then they went into QT in 2018 and 2019 Trump was all over the case of the Fed and blaming them you know for even trying to get interest rates within the range of something meaningful in real terms after inflation so that's why I think the indictment is so strong it came at the wrong time and it was really the wrong message utterly wrong as I say in the book I think he was more irresponsible Reckless on monetary policy then William Jennings Bryant you can't have someone back in the Oval Office who is going to be on the feds case to ease money to lower interest rates to buy in which is what he would do predictably if he gets a second term.

13:54. I am going to ask you later on a couple of good things about Trump.  He speaks as if there is no downside to lowering interest rates and of course we all like lower interest rates so the only obstacle is a lack of political will or dummies on the Federal Reserve board?  There like there are no economic consequences there is no meaning to interest rates they can just be arbitrarily set wherever we like.  Like you know he wouldn't even pause to wonder you know like, "I wonder it means if it seems . . . .  There's absolutely no reason not to do this, but there must be some, you know, I wonder what it is."

15:00.  It's obvious that a market sets interest rates it's what allocates capital it's what allocates economic activity if we've known for decades and decades and decades the price system is fundamental to capitals prosperity and if you don't have you know at least reasonably honest quasi market prices in the financial system we're going to end up with a mess we have today huge financial bubbles we're going to be sending the wrong message to Capitol Hill in other words the FED debt doesn't matter because the carry cost on the debt actually when the when the FED finally have the interest rates down to Rock Bottom average 1.6% well the politicians are going to worry about the cost of financing the debt and the carry cost of the debt if you drive the weighted average cost of the $34 trillion federal debt that's the problem is you know if you want to turn Wall Street into a speculative casino and if you want to turn Washington into a runaway spending machine, then artificially depressed interest rates to non-economic levels and I have a chart in the book which I think is worth bringing up if you take the period between the spring of 2008 right before the Great Recession and a year ago March 2022 when the FED finally reversed direction the real interest rate if you subtract the funds rate you subtract the year over year inflation from federal funds rate was negative 95.5% of the time in terms of months elapsed of the 183 months was negative over 170 months now that's crazy for that long of a period of time you were sending a signal to both Wall Street to speculate in the carry trades to your heart's content you were sending a message to the other end of the cell you can talk about the physical problem down the road but don't worry about it today or tomorrow or next year even because the carry cost is is rounding here