Republican presidential candidate and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview that slashing the Fed and unleashing growth is the key to getting out of the banking crisis.
Ramaswamy spoke to Breitbart News as the banking crisis continues to unfold, leaving many to wonder how America can get out of this situation.
As the world becomes increasingly engulfed in economic turmoil, Ramaswamy said he remains the only presidential candidate that has highlighted the Fed’s deep flaws that have led to the current economic uncertainty.
The American entrepreneur said that reforming the Federal Reserve — or slashing 22,000 employees at the Fed and severely narrowing the Fed’s duties — will help prevent future banking crises like the one America is currently experiencing.
He said the Federal Reserve has wrongly tried to play “God” by trying to hit two targets with one arrow by tackling both unemployment and inflation, describing it as a “disastrous” 25-year experiment. He said that the Fed should solely focus on stabilizing the American dollar than tackle too many economic issues at the same time.
Ramaswamy contended that the Fed relies too much on the alleged Phillips curve, which he said is based on a “flawed premise” and old historical data that does not apply to the modern American economy. The Phillips curve holds that there is a trade-off between inflation and employment: if unemployment goes too low, inflation is likely to go too high. Policymakers, especially at the Fed, are often implicitly using the Phillips curve when they say they need to reduce demand for workers to fight inflation.
Many lawmakers, including Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), have questioned the need to raise unemployment rates to curb inflation:
Ramaswamy also blamed the Fed for using lagging indicators of the boom-bust business cycle, such as wage growth, meaning that they may not be using data that would allow the Fed to see how the economy is adapting to higher interest rates in real time or anticipate changes not yet in backward looking data.
This has led many, including former Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke, to say that the Fed was slow to raise interest rates when inflation started to rapidly increase.
Now that the country appears to be entering another period of economic turmoil, Ramaswamy says that “reform of the Federal Reserve is critical.”
He said, “I’m going to, for that reason, restore its mission to a single purpose and you don’t need 22,000 employees to do it. You need way less than 2,000. That means over 90 percent headcount reduction there.”
Ramaswamy pivoted, saying the country needs to focus on ways to stimulate the economy in major ways rather than “quibbling” over spending increases, tax increases, or spending cuts.
“There’s an anti-growth movement in the country and part of the left that says, ‘You should learn to live with less.’ That’s what the climate cult is all about,” he explained, and that we need to “unleash American energy.”
He said that the country needs to put “people back to work” and remove “incentives” not to work. He said that Americans could easily get subsidies to become a gender studies major, but many may not have the resources to become a welder or a construction worker.
Ramaswamy said that America is “starving” for economic growth that will get America out of the current crisis and put Americans back to work.
He explained, “Broadly speaking, abandon the climate continental issue with energy and put people back to work by stopping giving them market-distorting incentives not to work and that I think are to be combined with Federal Reserve reform actually is a path to restoring GDP growth in this country, so that we don’t have to argue about small ball from entitlement cuts to tax increases about how we deal with our deficit, but actually restore growth, which in turn is actually our best way out of our other economic issues as well. No other candidate’s talking about it. I am the leading pro-growth candidate in this race. And I think that pro-growth economic agenda is something that I think the country is starving for, and I’m going to deliver it.”
Watch Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow’s interview with Ramaswamy on “Woke Capital” here:
Sean Moran is a policy reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.