On Wednesday’s broadcast of Bloomberg’s “Balance of Power,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) discussed the Federal Reserve’s decision on rates earlier in the day and said that “The labor market’s okay, it’s not great” and tariffs are one cause of inflation.
Kennedy said, “I guess I’d make two points: Number one, let’s not lose sight of the big picture, I wouldn’t trade the American economy right now for any economy in the world, not China, not Germany, not anybody in Europe, not Canada. Number two, I think the Fed didn’t hike because they don’t know what to do. Now, they’re not going to come out in front of the American people and say, we don’t know what the hell to do, but they’re not clairvoyant, they have to wait for the future like everybody else.”
He continued, “The Fed under Chairman Powell cut rates because they were worried about the labor market. The labor market’s okay, it’s not great. But — we’re not adding a ton of new jobs, but nobody’s being…laid off, relatively speaking. But we’ve got inflation, and it’s caused by three things in no particular order: Number one, all of this AI spending, they’re spending billions of dollars. I hope those guys know what they’re doing because they’ve got to pay the money back. Number two, to a lesser extent, tariffs, when imports cost more, that contributes to inflation. But, number three, the energy costs. You don’t have to be Einstein’s cousin to figure that out. And so, they want to just watch it and wait a little bit more, and that’s what I would’ve done, just wait and see and get a little bit more data.”
Kennedy further stated that the Fed’s “main role is inflation” and they “can’t let this inflation get out of control.”
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