Adam Taggart | Thoughtful Money, Released on 6/3/24

Between February 2022 and August 2023, in order to combat hot inflation, the Federal Reserve rocketed its discount rate from near 0% to 5.25% — the most aggressive interest rate schedule in living memory. Since then, the Fed has kept the rate at 5.25% — the ‘higher for longer’ era But despite this, even when paired with Quantitative Tightening, economic growth remains robust, inflation is lower but is proving sticky, unemployment remains under 4%, and the stock market is at all time highs. In short, the Fed’s aggressively restrictive policies haven’t cooled things down much. They’ve been so ineffective that even the Wall Street Journal is asking “Do interest rates really matter anymore?” To find out, we have the great fortune of speaking today with perhaps the world’s foremost living expert on interest rates, James Grant, founder and editor of the highly-respected market journal Grant’s Interest Rate Observer.

James “Jim” Grant is an American writer and publisher and the founder of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, a twice-monthly journal of the financial markets. He is the author , most recently, of The Forgotten Depression: 1921: The Crash That Cured Itself. Grant’s television appearances include “60 Minutes,” “The Charlie Rose Show,” Bloomberg TV, CNBC and other well-known financial news sources. His journalism has appeared in a variety of periodicals, including the “Financial Times”, “The Wall Street Journal” and “Foreign Affairs.”

Adam Taggart is the Founder of  Thoughtful Money. He is also Co-Founder and former President of Peak Prosperity. Adam is an experienced Silicon Valley internet executive and Stanford MBA. Prior to partnering with Chris Martenson (Adam was General Manager of our earlier site, ChrisMartenson.com), he was a Vice President at Yahoo!, a company he served for nine years. Before that, he did the ‘startup thing’ (mySimon.com, sold to CNET in 2001). As a fresh-faced graduate from Brown University in the early 1990s, Adam got a first-hand look at all that was broken with Wall Street as an investment banking analyst for Merrill Lynch. Most importantly, he’s a devoted husband and dad.

  economy, inflation, interest rates, investing, recession