Ken Griffin’s Warning on the Affordability Crisis

Will unchecked inflation cost the GOP control of Congress in the midterms? That’s the concern mooted this morning by a hedge fund billionaire, Ken Griffin, a Republican donor. “It’s quite ironic to see how the tables are turned,” Mr. Griffin asserts, “because just 12 months ago, President Trump and the Republicans swept into office on the issue of inflation.” Yet he reckons “the Democrats have rebranded the problem of inflation as the issue of affordability.”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 “poised to return to control the House,” and even the Senate, signaling “how the affordability issue strikes a chord.” He argues that consumers are “tired of the persistent and sticky inflation.” Mr. Trump’s deregulatory drive will eventually yield higher growth, Mr. Griffin adds, but inflation is pressing now.Mr. Trump is justified in blaming his predecessor for much of the inflation predicament. Prices rose some 20 percent during President Biden’s tenure in the White House. Yet while the pace of price increases has slowed, costs have not retreated to their levels before the Biden inflation spiral. That, Mr. Griffin avers, leads Americans to “feel like they can’t get ahead in a world where their savings and their wages are constantly deprecated by the impact of inflation.”It reflects the White House’s 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 “to turn the tables on Democrats for their outcry over the affordability crisis.” Mr. Vance rates the economy “A-plus-plus-plus,” and as for any griping by Democrats over affordability, he said: “you know what? They’re right — and it was because of them.”Mr. Vance is not wrong to decry the Biden-Harris administration’s agenda of federal overspending, over-regulating, and over-taxing for helping to trigger, then fuel, the inflationary wave. The Federal Reserve’s bloated balance sheet, the result of the central bank’s experimental Quantitative Easing program, is part of the problem too. Yet the monetary roots of the inflation — and affordability — crisis cannot be ignored, either.That’s 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 — meaning gold or silver — 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. An honest dollar helped fuel America’s 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, economists William Luther and Alexander William Salter have reported. Today’s surge in prices is accompanied by a plunge in the dollar’s gold value. Today a greenback fetches less than a 4,300th of a gold ounce, versus a 35th of an ounce before Bretton Woods’ end.Which brings us back to Mr. Griffin’s warning. Mr. Griffin contends that Mr. Trump’s agenda will, in the long run, help to improve affordability. Deregulation, he says, “should unleash productivity gains,” and bring “a very healthy reduction” in inflation. We need “to get to that point in time,” 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?

Ken Griffin’s Warning on the Affordability Crisis

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