Episode 119 – Point Counterpoint: The Biden First 100 Days with Robert Hockett

Robert Hockett is back to share his irrepressible optimism as he and Steve review Biden’s first 100 days. They both admit the administration has done more than they expected, but then again, they weren’t expecting much. When Pramila Jayapal awarded the president an A, she must have been grading on a curve.

Bob isn’t confident predicting what the coming months will bring, but he expresses both his hopes and fears around a number of issues. How will Biden navigate the shoals of very shallow Democratic support in the Senate? What are his choices and what are their potential consequences? With two more big spending bills in the wings, there’s a lot riding on Congress.  To some extent, Bob sees Biden’s fortunes aligned with our own: successful and popular domestic policies would translate into votes expanding the Democratic majority in the midterm elections.

Perhaps it’s unfair to judge an administration on the achievements of the first 100 days. Just consider FDR:

So one of the things that we tend to forget about the New Deal is that it wasn’t really just one big enactment and it wasn’t even like three or four big enactments. It was literally scores of distinct pieces of legislation rolled out sequentially over about a 13-year period . . . and the way it was sequenced, it was done in such a way as to ensure that FDR kept winning reelection and each time he won reelection, he could do even more.

On the international front, we’re witnessing a revival of America as agonist. This administration has no qualms about amping up a new cold war against Russia and China. The US uses tariffs and sanctions as a means of wielding power over other countries. Steve asks about the use of the payment system to lock them out.

Bob thinks China is playing a very smart game. As long as they remain an export-led growth economy, they benefit from the dollar’s dominant position in the global monetary system. But China is moving towards a domestically generated demand-focused economy, at which point the dollar’s position as reserve currency will no longer serve their interests. In Bob’s view, they’re taking advantage of the current arrangements while wisely getting their ducks in a row. Meanwhile, they’re making advances towards becoming one of the most important global players in digital currency and finance. 

 There’s much more to this episode, from elite control fraud in the financial industry to the effect of the pandemic on the powerless. Agree or disagree, an hour with Bob Hockett is sure to engage, inform, and probably amuse you.

Robert Hockett is the Edward Cornell Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, Visiting Professor of Finance at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, and Senior Counsel at Westwood Capital, LLC. He specializes in the law, economics, and philosophy of money, finance, and enterprise organization in their theoretical and practical, their positive and normative, and their local, national, and transnational dimensions.

Follow Robert on Twitter @rch371

Macro N Cheese – Episode 119
Point Counterpoint: The Biden First 100 Days with Robert Hockett
May 8, 2021

[00:00:04.700] – Robert Hockett [intro/music]

I think that the crimes that were rampant during the later Obama years and during the Trump years really ought to be pursued by the DOJ with a great deal of zeal right now. And I don’t see any sign that that’s happening.

[00:00:22.610] – Robert Hockett [intro/music]

Like you, I’m going to be watching pretty carefully because we’ve been fooled many a time with the window dressing and the pretty speeches, and I’m standing between you and the pitchforks line that ends up meaning nothing. My eyes are open to that, too, but so far it’s looking like the real thing to me. So I’m pretty hopeful even without being dogmatically hopeful.

[00:01:35.230] – Geoff Ginter [intro/music]

Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

[00:01:43.060] – Steve Grumbine

All right, everybody, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese, another episode, a fine episode waiting for you here. I’ve brought in my good friend Robert Hockett. And Robert has been on the show many times because he presents such an incredibly deep wealth of information to our audience. And I’m particularly interested in understanding what Biden’s first hundred days look like.

And as a progressive, I look around the Twitter sphere and read the news and they don’t align with one another. The progressive community has taken a decidedly different view of Biden from his role on immigration and increasing the number of cages that were used as a direct reason to get rid of Trump. The $2,000 checks and only getting fourteen hundred, his opposition to Medicare for all, legalizing marijuana.

I could go on and on and honestly what I’m seeing now is we go into this infrastructure phase of rebuilding. We’re seeing China become what looks like the old Russia, the new Cold War. We’re going to use a Cold War mindset to ramp up the machine, to build back better, so to speak. And I figured what better person to have on than Bob Hockett?

Because even if I don’t agree with Bob, I always know, number one, he’s going to be respectful. Number two he’s going to present the information to the best of his ability. And number three, he’s got an insider’s view. He’s around the people that are making these calls. He knows what happens in the conference calls, behind the scenes.

This is a gentleman who brings the truth at all times, even if you don’t like it. So I want to be crystal clear there that Bob is being brought on for the supreme sacrifice of being the guy to present the pro-Biden perspective. [laughter] So, without further ado, let me bring on my friend and wonderful pundit Bob Hockett. Bob, thank you so much for joining me today.

[00:03:40.000] – Robert Hockett

Thank you, Steve. As you know, I love being on with you. And that was one of your best introductions yet. [laughs] Absolutely loved that. Looking forward to it. Thanks so much, my friend.

[00:03:50.020] – Grumbine

No problem. So we went through four years of hell, partially about Trump, but partially about the divide at the worker bee level, at the voter level. It was like living in a hostage situation. No matter where you stood, the entire country was gripped by chaos. And we’ve slid into the Joe Biden presidency and he just recently addressed both houses of Congress. And there were a lot of progressive things said in that discussion.

And there was, quite frankly, a lot of things that sounded an awful lot like Modern Monetary Theory being slid into that discussion. But some of the outcomes that I think the average progressive is looking for, they’re saying, “I’m just not seeing it.” But I’m curious, in the spirit of candor present to me what the first hundred days of Joe Biden’s presidency look like to you. Give us the plus side of this. Help me see the sunshine in this picture.

[00:04:51.520] – Hockett

Yeah. So what I’m going to try to do is discount two factors that might be making this look better to me than it really is and try to explain why things look kind of good to me, even discounting those two factors that one has to take into account. Right?

So the first factor that might lead to a distortedly positive view, I think you’ve effectively just alluded to, Steve, and that is that the previous four years before January 20th were so just extraordinarily hellish that if Biden were a horse, it would still look good, you know what I mean, [laughter] compared to what we had. 

I’m sort of alluding to – was it Caligula who appointed a horse to the Senate? He could be a non-human animal and he would still seem a great president compared to Trump. So I’m trying to take into account that my glasses might be somewhat rose-tinted just because he’s not a lunatic. [laughs]

[00:05:49.840] – Grumbine

It exceeds metabolic optimism. [laughs]

[00:05:53.680] – Hockett

Yeah, exactly, right? It’s kind of commonplace that a family that has an alcoholic or a drug-addicted member of it, sometimes the entire family dynamic basically develops around that one supreme dysfunction revolves around it and the way the planets revolve around the sun in the solar system.

I think for four years everything was revolving around this strange cocaine addict or lunatic in the middle of the room. And all that Biden has to do to look relatively good [laughs] is just to breathe and not urinate on the resolute desk every morning. And then he looks good, right? Or he looks better.

So I’m trying to take account of the fact that I might be viewing things through rose-tinted glasses on that basis. The other factor I’m trying to discount for is the very low bar or low set of expectations I had for Mr. Biden himself, especially until sometime last summer. Right?

As you know, I was, I think probably – maybe even excessively – vocally uncharitable, to put it sort of politely [laughs] about Mr. Biden from the very first day that he announced his entry in the race in 2019, all the way down until I think really after the murder of George Floyd until sometime in June or July. Basically, I think I went softer on Biden when Bernie did. Right?

Once Bernie looked like it was pretty clear he wasn’t going to be staying in the race. So he was beginning to make his peace with Joe at around the same time. And so did I. But before that, which means less than a year ago or up until less than a year ago, I was pretty down on Biden and was routinely calling into question his cognitive capacities, the likelihood that he’ll be able to stay awake in office.

I was pretty mean. And so the fact that Biden has not turned out to be this guy whose lips move when he reads or something, I don’t want that to be influencing my somewhat less negative take on him now either, right? In other words, I’m going to try to be kind of objective in that sense, at least insofar as I can be.

[00:08:01.510] – Grumbine

Yes.

[00:08:01.510] – Hockett

So even taking all of that into account, then, I’m pleasantly surprised. I didn’t think that things would go this well, and when I say this well, I don’t mean to say that I think everything’s hunky-dory, it’s all wonderful, blah, blah, blah. I just mean that I expected a lot worse even after having made my peace with Biden in the way that Bernie did. And I’ll say why here really quickly.

But first of all, I do want to acknowledge the negatives that you yourself pointed out right at the get-go. I, like you, am worried that China is being turned into a kind of foil at the risk of a Cold War or something worse than a Cold War’s taking over our thinking. I’m also a bit concerned about the possibility of a resumption of just outright hostility to Russia, of the kind that preceded Mr. Trump’s taking office.

That’s not to endorse Mr. Trump’s possible employment by the Russian state [laughs] but it is to say that I’ve never understood why Russia had to be demonized and why there had to be a constantly agonistic relation between the United States and Russia, even after 1991. Just doesn’t make sense to me.

And insofar as Mr. Biden appears to be resurrecting a bit of that and insofar as he seems to be setting up China as another existential enemy, I’ve got misgivings as you have. I’ll try to put a positive spin on a version of that in a moment, but notwithstanding that fact, I want to again say I’ve got misgivings about this. I don’t see why everything has to be agonistic. All right, so all of this sort of “throat clearings”…

[00:09:39.780] – Grumbine

[laughter] Fair enough.

[00:09:39.780] – Hockett

…out of the way. Here’s how it’s kind of looking to me. I think that what’s going on here, what seems to me to be going on here is that I think that insofar as there is a real Joe Biden, that that real Joe Biden has been kind of buried or hidden for decades now owing to a particular perception that Biden might have had of the American political landscape, which might have been an accurate vision, might not have been.

He’s closer to it than I’ve ever been, so maybe he knew more than I did. But I think the real Joe Biden is more a kind of working-class, blue-collar kind of guy, or at least he thinks of himself that way. And his instincts I thought of as being that way.

And then I thought of him as having buried that in effect under the influence of this conventional wisdom that seems to have been shared widely among Democrats until quite recently – essentially until Bernie proved everybody wrong – that the only way to succeed as a Democrat was to be a kind of neoliberal Democrat, to be a kind of Clintonian DNC type.

And my guess is that Biden is suddenly realizing, hey, that’s over. I can actually be who I thought of myself as being back when I was in my late 20s and early 30s now and get away with it, partly because the dominant consensus has moved leftward, largely thanks to Bernie and others like the squad and also maybe because there’s no higher place to go from here, right. This is my gold watch, as it were.

This is my retirement gift: this presidency. [laughter] So I don’t have to make nice with any creeps or compromise my principles in order to keep office meaning in turn that if I’m going to compromise, it won’t be a matter of compromising in the sense of pretending to think something that I don’t think. It’ll only be compromising in the sense of agreeing to make some concessions to somebody like Joe Manchin in order to get some legislation passed.

And it seems to me that maybe that Joe Biden is reemerging in a sense. Now, this might be too kind to Biden because there’s two flaws, right? Even if I’m right, there’s sort of two problems here, right? I should say, even if what I’m saying is plausible, there’s sort of two caveats, I guess, have to be added. The first is that if what I’ve just suggested is true, then it means that for more than half of his life, he’s been faking it, right?

[00:12:07.070] – Grumbine

Aha.

[00:12:07.070] – Hockett

And if you fake it for more than half of your life, I think a real question, a legitimate question arises as to whether it really was still faking after…[laughter]

[00:12:16.130] – Grumbine

That’s pretty good method acting right?

[00:12:18.800] – Hockett

After 30 years of it, I mean, maybe it just sort of becomes who you really are. Maybe it’s not plausible to suggest that you’ve been incognito for more than half of your life. So I’m entirely comfortable with acknowledging that as a serious, possibly undermining entailment of what I just said. The other fly in that ointment is that – let’s say that it is true.

Let’s say he was being incognito for more than half of his life and that the real Joe Biden was something he was simply keeping hidden out of a kind of calculating mentality. Well, then that suggests he’s been being, in a certain sense, hypocritical or a fraud, you know? He’s been sort of defrauding us as the neoliberal that he’s essentially acted like until relatively recently.

And that’s not a particularly heroic feature of a person either, right? So even if what I’m saying or what I’m suggesting is my provisional interpretation of Biden and his apparent conversion over the last year is true or plausible, it still doesn’t speak altogether well of Mr. Biden. After all, Bernie didn’t have to fake it for the last 40 years, as we’ve talked about before.

You listen to Bernie speeches from the early 1980s and they’re the same speeches as now, you just sort of plug in a different set of numbers. Instead of “a nation of 180 million people” it becomes “a nation of 330 million people.” Otherwise the same speech, right? I’m sure that somebody might rejoin that: “Well, yeah, but Bernie’s from Vermont and you can get away with that in Vermont. He’s been like the token integrity guy and we can only have one or two of those.

And so you can’t blame Joe for not having been one.” I don’t really have a strong opinion one way or the other on that. But I’ll just say again that I have this provisional view at the moment, which is entirely changeable, is that maybe Joe has kind of rediscovered who he was at the beginning and is maybe even experiencing a certain sense of exhilaration of being able to reveal that person again and take off the mask of the last 35 or 40 years.

[00:14:16.370] – Grumbine

Can I interrupt you momentarily? Because I love what you’re saying on one level and on the other side, there’s this quiver in my stomach. I want to like it, but I hear Pramila Jayapal give Joe Biden an A. An A! Now being a former student and someone that knows what it’s like to get an A grade occasionally – rarely, but occasionally – you know that if there’s 10 points to make up 100 percent, that an A is nine out of 10.

[00:14:49.860] – Hockett

Yeah.

[00:14:50.260] – Grumbine

And if you get a B, that’s eight out of 10 and a C is seven out of 10, D six out of 10. And you fail at five out of 10. But see, when you say you failed, you still may have got five things right.

[00:15:04.370] – Hockett

Yeah. Yeah.

[00:15:05.620] – Grumbine

And so, we had a pandemic, you didn’t give us Medicare for all. Wow. Here we are in desperate need of payments because we’ve gone almost a year with mortgages piling up and rent piling up and bills piling up and many people out of work. Instead of giving a measly – two thousand was measly – but instead of giving two thousand, you come back. Aw yeah, psych! Here’s fourteen hundred. I think of those as the negative side of that “out of 10.”

[00:15:36.040] – Hockett

Um-hum.

[00:15:36.040] – Grumbine

And it doesn’t measure up to a nine out of 10, which Jayapal, who’s supposed to be the most fierce opposition to the establishment as the progressive head of the caucus.

[00:15:47.146] – Hockett

Um-hum.

[00:15:47.740] – Grumbine

And I think to myself, what are you doing? If you’re ready to give him a nine out of 10 or a 10 out of 10, and we don’t even have Medicare For All, we didn’t get really meaningful checks to help out with people. We don’t have student debt eliminated. We don’t have any of these things. With all that in mind, how in the world are you giving him a nine or 10 out of 10?

And this is kind of the prevailing wind within the elected community, and that’s kind of the narrative that’s trying to be pushed out. It’s kind of like in the movie The Matrix, Cypher’s going, “You know, I know this isn’t steak. I still love it.” And I think that they’re trying to sell that. And I think a lot of people are rejecting the programming right now. Again, five out of 10 is still five things correct. It’s not like you’re saying you got zero things correct.

[00:16:38.170] – Hockett

Right.

[00:16:38.170] – Grumbine

But you’re still failing.

[00:16:40.090] – Hockett

Yeah, I get that, Steve. But I think maybe what Pramila would say – and I’m sort of inclined to say this as well – is that it might be better to think of this as a test with 10 questions. Let’s say you’ve been given an hour to complete the test, right? The ten-question test. And we’re now like, let’s say, 15 minutes into the test.

And so you’ve basically answered three or four of the 10 questions thus far, maybe let’s say three. And let’s say that those three you’ve answered correctly and there’s still lots of time ahead to get to the next questions and to answer those correctly or incorrectly. I think in the first hundred days, it might be kind of like that.

I think what she might be thinking of – if not, it’s at least the way I’m kind of looking at it – is there’s only so much you can do in the first hundred days. And so the question then becomes, well, what do you prioritize first? Right? And then what are the obstacles that you have to deal with in dealing with those first, let’s say, two or three questions, and then how do you handle it against that backdrop?

And it seems to me that his opening gambit is basically three big pieces of legislation. And I think he’s thinking of these three as constituting a whole. The first is $1.9 trillion. That one got passed. The second one is going to be $2.3 trillion, and then the third one is going to be another, I think it was $2.1 trillion, something like that.

And the aim is to have all three of those passed by this August. So the first one got done last month, working on the second one now, and he unveiled the third one just two days ago. It seems to me that those are a good three to start with because they do focus on a lot of the core problems that have to be dealt with.

[00:18:25.390] – Grumbine

So start with number one. What is that first piece? I know it just passed, but…

[00:18:30.610] – Hockett

Yeah

[00:18:31.000] – Grumbine

Tell us what that first one was.

[00:18:33.280] – Hockett

So that includes, of course, the $1,400 rather than the $2,000 that you mentioned. It included a lot of vaccine programmatics. It’s basically about handling the last months, you might say, of covid’s rampancy. Right? It’s kind of about the end of covid and hastening the coming of the end of covid and enabling people to continue to get by for, you know, all the way down until August, even after covid.

And I’m with you in thinking that the $1.9 trillion is unnecessarily low ball. That $2,000 checks were indeed called for, not $1,400 checks. In other words, those earlier six hundred ones shouldn’t have been counted against the two thousand. But this is where another factor comes in, and that is that he is having to deal with Sinema and Joe Manchin and we literally do not have a majority in the Senate.

So he’s kind of got to keep those two people on board. And the question then becomes, all right, well, what should he do with them? Should he go to war with them or should he see if he can get at least a decent amount done by bargaining with them in the short run on the understanding that this itself will strengthen him further in the longer run to start demanding more or start getting more?

And that’s what I think is happening here. I might be wrong, of course, but people I’ve talked to who seem to know the West Virginia landscape pretty well, basically seem to be saying that there literally is no other Democrat in West Virginia who has any chance of replacing Joe Manchin and being better than Joe Manchin. You know what I mean? That basically the only alternative to Manchin is some Republican. And Manchin himself is obviously a Republican.

[00:20:32.630] – Grumbine

[laughter] I was going to say he’s got a D in front of his name, but that’s a veneer. You can wipe it off with a sticky, you know, a spongy.

[00:20:37.890] – Hockett

Yeah, some think he might. Some think he still has that in contemplation. I hope that’s wrong. And I have to say, I’m having a little trouble figuring Joe Manchin himself out. Right? One day he says that he’d be all in for a $4 trillion infrastructure package, even a $5 trillion one, as long as it didn’t blow out the budget, meaning as long as, you know, taxes are raised too [laughs]

[00:21:02.250] – Grumbine

Oh, my!

[00:21:02.250] – Hockett

And of course, you and I know what to think about that.

[00:21:04.460] – Grumbine

Uh huh.

[00:21:05.070] – Hockett

But then in the next moment Biden says, “All right, yeah. Ok, we’ll increase the top marginal rate on the income tax and we’ll raise corporate taxes. How’s that, Joe?” And then Manchin makes a few noises to make it sound like he’s worried about taxing corporations more. And I’m thinking, if I’m Joe Biden I’m tearing my hair out and thinking, well, what the fuck do I have to do to keep this guy on board, especially when he himself seems to be incoherent?

One moment talking about $4 trillion big fine, maybe even $5 trillion. The next moment balking at a mere $2.3 trillion, partly because it does what he appeared to be demanding before. And I think Biden, of course, has a long term friendship with Manchin back when they were both in the Senate and they both come from almost neighboring states, sort of the same part of the country.

I think, my guess is that Biden is somewhat optimistic about his ability to lever the personal friendship and connection with Joe Manchin on the one hand, and probably partly worried about what alternative there could be to Manchin, on the other hand. And he’s presumably trying to work as hard as he can to get as much through as he can, given who Manchin is.

I doubt that he’s quite as worried about Sinema just because she’s new and so he doesn’t have the long-term friendship with her. But my guess is that he’s fairly optimistic about what he can talk Manchin into as long as he makes nice with him. Whereas if he goes to war with him and goes to the mattresses in the way that Reagan did with recalcitrant Democrats by, you know, trying to appeal over their heads to their constituencies, I think he’s worried that then he burns the bridge with Manchin.

And then best case scenario is Manchin hates his guts but stays a Democrat. And worst case scenario is that Manchin actually just flips parties or gets defeated in his next reelection campaign by a Republican. Now, that might be charitable on my part, Steve. I might be projecting the way I would think onto Joe [laughs] which might be a risky proposition here, but trying to assume the best until shown the worst.

It seems to me that even under a best-case scenario, Biden’s hands are somewhat tied by the Manchin problem. And it might be then that what he’s doing is trying to navigate that problem as best he can. And that’s why he went ahead and settled for the $1.9 trillion in the first enactment.

And why also, he said he’d be willing to countenance raising taxes in the second one, because remember when they were first talking about the second one, when they were still talking about the infrastructure package, there was no talk of taxes at all. That didn’t happen.

There was no reference to raising the corporate tax rate or raising the top marginal rate until after Manchin and a few others, so-called moderate Dems, said that they would be cool with big infrastructure spending, but that they’re worried about the budget. And so that’s when Biden and the administration began to talk about that.

So I don’t have enough inside knowledge to say this with some kind of certainty and say, “Oh, yes, take it from me. I can assure you that, blah, blah, blah.” But my best guess on the basis of what I’m seeing and hearing is that Biden is trying to navigate these very narrow shoals between Scylla and Charybdis, one of which has to be renamed Manchin.

[00:24:26.580] – Grumbine

Right. So let me just ask you then, when we look at the military budget, the military budget shot up even more than under Trump.

[00:24:35.500] – Hockett

Yeah.

[00:24:36.470] – Grumbine

And I don’t believe a single one of them asked, ”how are you going to pay for it?” Not a single one of them made this a hill to die on. I think it pretty much went through without even a flinch.

[00:24:50.300] – Hockett

Um hum.

[00:24:50.300] – Grumbine

And yet I remember the Democrats loudly decrying Trump’s military budget going up,

[00:24:57.890] – Hockett

Um hum.

[00:24:57.890] – Grumbine

At least some of them.

[00:24:59.810] – Hockett

Oh yeah.

[00:24:59.810] – Grumbine

It was quiet as could be. Here’s some grease. Let’s slide it through. I don’t understand.

[00:25:05.330] – Hockett

Yeah. So this really highlights, I think, Steve, a very worrisome sort of cleavage in a way, I think, between the domestic policy of the Biden administration – at least, assuming that the interpretation that I’ve just laid upon it has any soundness to it – then there’s a cleavage between the domestic policy administration and the foreign policy by the administration.

I’m going to suggest one possible bridge between the two that might account for some things in just a second. But first, just to sort of characterize the two sides of the divide, I mean, let’s assume for the sake of argument that Biden really is trying to be a second LBJ or something on the domestic front. Well, that’s great in the sense that at least we’re going back to the pre-Jimmy Carter period, which is when Democrats began to get pretty domestically conservative.

And if that’s true, then that’s kind of good news. But then you look at the foreign policy side of things, and in some ways it’s a regression even from Trump, as you suggested, because as bad as Trump was, he does seem to have been allergic to foreign military entanglements and seemed to be really kind of keen to disengage from those.

And some of what we’re seeing in the Biden administration looks like a bit of a return to a kind of Obama form of neoliberal foreign policy or even worse, you know, even Clintonian. And the examples that you’ve given already are great ones, right? And it’s really kind of weird and worrisome. The one possible – I don’t want to call the silver lining – but the one possibly mitigating factor, but I have to confess that I don’t really quite believe this.

This is what I want to believe. But this will probably surprise you that here’s a case where I’m going to present the best case scenario and then say I don’t quite believe it, but I wish it were true. Usually, I’m saying I think probably or possibly true. Here I don’t think it’s true or it might be partly true, but… And it’s this: I think that some progressive Democrats have discovered that they can get some Republican agreement to some things if they can spin a China story around it.

So I’ll give you an anecdote first. So as you know, I’ve been pushing this Treasury dollar plan that I put out a while back. And I think we even talked about it on the show at one point, the Digital Greenbacks Plan. And the idea would be for the federal government, starting with Treasury and then ultimately migrating it over to the Fed, would issue to every citizen and legal resident and small business of the country a digital wallet into which helicopter drops could be made or JG payments could be made.

And people would have savings vehicles and payment vehicles that would involve no fees or minimum balance requirements or anything of that kind. And when I put that proposal out there, a bit over a year ago now, I managed to get a lot of meetings with various members of Congress. And to my immense surprise, those meetings were on both sides of the proverbial aisle.

In other words, there were a lot of Dem Congress members I was able to talk to and a lot of Republican ones, too, which is something of a first for me. And the way it worked was that basically, if you played up the universal banking, the payment platform as an essential infrastructure, commercial society or an exchange economy like ours. Basically you talked up the social justice and the sort of economic efficiency stuff with the Dems, that’s what made them perk up their ears.

But with the Republicans, what you had to do was say, “Well, look, China is making a big move into the digital sovereign currency space and that’s going to give them a leg up on new Fintech but just basically infotech more broadly, it’s going to enable them to position themselves as the dominant global player where the new digital technologies are concerned and the U.S. will fall behind.”

And I don’t actually, frankly, fully believe that. Right? [laughter] But Republicans were perfectly ready to believe that. And it certainly was a way of getting their attention. You could say, look, we have to be at the front end or the cutting edge of digital currency development, because it’s the bridge into digital other development, and we don’t want to fall behind on that. And it worked, right? Republicans suddenly sounded interested in what I was pushing.

[00:29:20.080] – Grumbine

This is really a big deal. I want to ask you point blank, so we use a lot of means of tariffs and more importantly, sanctions on different countries. And we use the payment system as a means of locking them out.

[00:29:37.120] – Hockett

Yeah.

[00:29:37.630] – Grumbine

And by migrating to their own digital payment system and maybe avoiding this, is this not a strategic geopolitical move to position them from being free of U.S. influence?

[00:29:50.570] – Hockett

It could be partly that. Indeed, I’m sure it’s partly that in the sense that the Chinese government officials and the central bank, right, the People’s Bank of China, they all understand that there’s a dollar-dominated global monetary system and global trading system and global financial system. To some extent, they’re actually playing a very smart game.

They benefit from the dollar’s role for the time being, for as long as they remain an export-led growth economy. And as you know, they’re trying to transition away from that and become a more domestically generated demand-focused economy. And they’ll get there. They’re getting there pretty quickly. But for the time being, it’s still largely an export-oriented economy.

And insofar as that’s the case, the dollar’s role as a reserve currency means the dollar is overvalued relative to their M & B, and that means that American products are overpriced in comparison to Chinese products and vice versa. But the savvy game that they’re playing is they realized that once they move to a more domestic demand-generated economic growth model, once they succeed in getting there, it will no longer be as advantageous to them for the dollar to play the role that it does globally.

And so what they seem to be doing at the moment is to continue to milk the current arrangements for all they’re worth, while they are still worth something to the Chinese, while at the same time getting all the ducks in a row for when the time comes that it no longer behooves them to be locked into the American regime, the post-1945 regime. And I think that’s part of what’s happening right now.

A lot of the work that they’re doing in the digital currency space and digital finance space can be, I think, interpreted as getting those ducks in a row, as I put it a moment ago, for that post-American hegemony period that we’re approaching, but it can also more broadly be viewed as very sensible steps in the direction of becoming one of the most important global players, if not the most important global player in new tech more generally.

They want to be, I think, the sort of preeminent technological power. I hate those words, this power and that power. But insofar as people still think in those terms and the Chinese government and the American government both seem to think in those terms still, I think they want to be out front by 2025 or so. And I myself, I don’t think the digital currency is that central to that, but it is related to that.

But what I do is I tend to play it up when talking to Republican legislators because that really gets them interested. It’s basically because of an atavistic mentality, right? You can basically turn everything into a war game then they’re interested, right? It’s just the way they think, it seems.

And I’m wondering if part of what Biden is doing is that. Although I also personally think that Biden actually does think in terms of China being some existential competitor. In other words, I don’t think that Biden is merely being cynical in the way that I think. Right?

[00:33:01.450] – Intermission

You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast brought to you by Real Progressives, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching the masses about MMT or Modern Monetary Theory. Please help our efforts and become a monthly donor at PayPal or Patreon, like and follow our pages on Facebook and YouTube, and follow us on Periscope, Twitter, and Instagram.

[00:33:50.640] – Grumbine

He has clearly taken the position over and over again, in my opinion, anyway, that it’s an us against them kind of scenario.

[00:33:58.530] – Hockett

Yeah, yeah.

[00:33:59.340] – Grumbine

And I think that we don’t have a more cooperative society. I think that we don’t view ourselves on the global stage as cooperative partners to build a mutually beneficial whatever.

[00:34:12.930] – Hockett

Um hum.

[00:34:12.930] – Grumbine

And it may be this is just capital’s role in society. But it’s not capital. It’s the government’s. And well if the governments are doing that maybe capital owns the government. It’s not a maybe. I think it’s blatant.

[00:34:26.490] – Hockett

Yeah.

[00:34:26.490] – Grumbine

How do we break that stranglehold or do we just accept that this is the way it is? And I just don’t want to cheer that on. I feel like that sets the stage for the meat grinder at home, too.

[00:34:37.410] – Hockett

Um hum.

[00:34:37.410] – Grumbine

Part of me dreads the coming out of the covid world because the one thing that was nice about the covid world, as horrible as that sounds, is that I think people got to be with their families. They didn’t have to quickly brush their teeth as they’re drinking coffee at the same time to get a tie on to get to an office.

[00:34:55.797] – Hockett

Um hum. Um hum.

[00:34:56.580] – Grumbine

The world slowed down.

[00:34:58.200] – Hockett

Yeah, yeah.

[00:34:58.950] – Grumbine

And you got to breathe for a minute. And I know that that’s a privileged stance with so many homeless, but in general, though, I think it was good for the environment. I think we didn’t learn the lessons we could have learned from this.

[00:35:12.220] – Hockett

Um hum. Um hum.

[00:35:12.220] – Grumbine

But as we come out of this in the ramping up period. I know people are tired of being locked in their houses, but the meat grinder is about to really kick in.

[00:35:22.040] – Hockett

Yeah, I’m entirely with you on that, my friend. I’ve had the similar thought that the one partial silver lining that’s come of this, I guess, a cluster of silver linings that are all kind of interconnected, but among them are first, I think some people have become more aware of how dependent they are on underpaid and underprivileged people right now.

For example, just think of people who are delivery drivers for Instacart or something. Right? They basically enabled life to go on for an awful lot of people, and the only way they were able to do that was by exposing themselves to risk that people who stayed home did not. And I think people like you and I have known that in an abstract or general sense forever, but to experience it viscerally with each Instacart delivery as it was the case last spring.

[00:36:20.310] – Grumbine

Yup.

[00:36:20.310] – Hockett

Concretizes it to the point where I started thinking, gee, this is a bloody scandal that I’m giving 20 percent tips on this. These deliverers are keeping me alive and they’re exposing themselves to risk. And at the same time, I’m spending much less money because there’s just no entertainment. So I just sort of boosting the tips to 100 percent.

And I’m sure lots of other people did similar things. And even that’s just a drop in the bucket. It’s like nothing. So being brought face to face with the starkness of the inequitable distribution of advantage under our arrangements was in some ways a kind of silver lining. And another was related to that.

And you mentioned it as well, just a reevaluation of things and reminding yourself of what matters most and who matters most to you and just not to be preoccupied every day with all the external things, right? I have a fairly strong monastic streak in my psychological makeup anyway. I’ve spent lots of time on retreats in monasteries over my life and kind of need that.

And this has been like a year’s worth of largely monastic existence and, in some ways, it’s been very enriching, I think, kind of spiritually, you know, and I hate to see us being dragged out of that, too. But one of the reasons for that is just quite apart from the personal reasons, is that I think it’s going to make people more fight or flight again in a way that maybe they haven’t.

But ironically, you’d think that if anything would make you fight or flight, it’s the existential threat of pandemic with death happening all around. But in a weird way, you batten down the hatches, so to speak, and lockdown in your home. And if you didn’t have to go out all that much other than maybe to get some groceries, and if you didn’t even have to do that because you could just order stuff, in a weird way it spared you a lot of that feeling of being in some sort of electrified cage or something.

And at least for me, and I’m guessing that I’m not unusual, so I’m sure that this is the same effect on a lot of other people. I just felt a lot less like I have to be fighting all the time. I just felt a lot less like I’m in the midst of a struggle. And if that’s the case across the board, then it makes people less warlike. I mean, they’re not in fight or flight mode. They’re not adrenalized by the stresses.

And suddenly the emails are beginning to crowd in again, the pace of email invitations coming in to be part of this conference or to give this talk or whatever is suddenly accelerating again and not just Zoom now – live appearances. And I have to say, I don’t want to go back to that, Steve, where I might have to go to Berlin twice in one month and couldn’t even make it one trip just because it would be hard to say no.

And I’ve been so happy for the last year. This is, again, just a silver lining thing. I don’t want to say that. I’m therefore glad that there was covid, but in silver linings mode, it’s just been so great not to have to search for an excuse not to go to Berlin just to say, can we do this by Zoom? So I’m a little worried to get back to your question and then your comment in connection with the question. I am worried that we’re going to become more warlike again as the rat race, as they call it, begins to accelerate again.

And that’s going to lend itself to even more, I think, atavistic and agonistic perceptions of adversaries or putative adversaries. And it’s going to color people’s way of thinking about other countries and our interactions with other countries. And I’m worried about that, just like you are. Mr. Biden has given us no reason so far to be confident that that’s not going to happen.

[00:40:00.680] – Grumbine

Well, when you say that, think about the infrastructure bill. The second you said that was three parts, this is the second we’re still in the middle of. And what this means is ultimately ratcheting back up growth back into a big growth moment again.

[00:40:16.830] – Hockett

Yeah.

[00:40:17.330] – Grumbine

Now, mind you, some of this stuff is absolutely vital. And if we build it in a sustainable way, it can be a tremendous boom for us, not just families making money and earning a living in the society the way things are structured economically, but long term.

The Green New Deal, which Biden, at least in framing, was opposed to, I wonder where does this infrastructure and concept of green energy and sustainable approaches to building cities and systems, where does that fit into this or is that secondary to competing with China?

[00:40:56.490] – Hockett

Well, it’s interesting. Here, I think, again, it’s sort of a mixed bag, at least it looks to me at the moment, Steve, like a mixed bag again, there’s a “on the one hand, on the other hand” character to it or a “good news and bad news” story here. The bad news is that it’s not the Green New Deal, either in terms of the full scope of the ambition of the Green New Deal or in terms of the size of the projected expenditure, the magnitude of the transformation in dollar terms.

Most of us Green New Dealers, yourself included, of course, I think we’ve been thinking in terms of multiple trillions and double digit worth of trillions, right? And let’s say best case scenario at the moment, we’re “building back better” if we think of the first three big initiatives of this administration as all having something to do with it, would be best-case scenario, six trillion.

It’s more like five something, really, because a lot of it is more about covid relief than about long-term structural transformation. So one of the bad news elements is that it’s scaled back relative to the fullness of the Green New Deal ambition; and again, relative to the scope across subject areas, you might say, or across sectors of the original Green New Deal.

Another piece of the bad news side of the story is that they are resorting to constant references to competition with China to help motivate it to say, “Oh, you know, China’s going to be dominant to these new green technologies unless we make our move,” which is, again, a return to that atavistic way of doing things that you and I are decrying. So there’s another piece of the bad news.

On the good news side of the ledger, I think would be the fact that I at least thought and a lot of people, I gather, thought that once it became clear that Bernie wasn’t going to end up being the nominee around this time last year, maybe a little bit later than this time last year, let’s say around May or so of 2020, I think most of us probably thought, well, say goodbye to the Green New Deal and hence, say goodbye to the planet.

Joe at the most is going to do these mealy-mouthed Barack Obama-type things which are gonna be far too late. It’ll just be embarrassing. Better off just doing nothing than to pretend to be doing something when what you’re doing is so piss-poor, right?

And instead, it’s turned out to be much more substantial, I think, than most of us were anticipating. Now, there’s a danger here, of course, then that I’m once again just judging by reference to a very low bar. So, of course, it looks good compared to that. But nevertheless…

[00:43:30.330] – Grumbine

That’s my five out of 10.

[00:43:32.500] – Hockett

Yeah, I might be lurching into that five out of 10 territory here and doing the Pramila thing. But I guess the question is, at that point, we’ve once again, in a sense, come back to the question of, all right, but where are we in the test at the moment? Are we still doing the first three questions or are we looking at all 10? Because it’s possible that what Biden is doing is playing a long game in the way that FDR did, right?

So one of the things that we tend to forget about the New Deal is that it wasn’t really just one big enactment and it wasn’t even like three or four big enactments. It was like literally scores of distinct pieces of legislation rolled out sequentially over about a 13 year period, maybe, let’s say 12 and a half-year period.

And the way it was sequenced, it was done in such a way as to ensure that FDR kept winning reelection and each time he won reelection, then he could do even more. And my guess – it’s a partly educated guess in the sense that there’s some confirmation from people who are close to the administration or in the administration, but also, I’m doing a bit of extrapolating, too – is that they have their eyes on the 2022 midterms, right?

They don’t want to happen to Biden what happened to Obama in 2010. And so they’re trying to get a lot of bang for the buck with the so-called Reagan Democrats who came back to the Democratic fold for Obama’s first term and then defected over to Trump rather than vote for Clinton in 2016. They want to get those people back and keep them back and maybe even with a larger majority in the House and an actual majority in the Senate, come 2022.

So that the next steps would be bigger than the first steps were and then basically keep snowballing like that until the full eight years worth of Biden are done. Now, again, I might be projecting an excessively unwarranted charitable way to the administration, [laughter] but I can at least say that from what I know for what I’m able to see so far, this is not just an outright implausible attribution of strategy or strategic thinking, right?

There is reason to think that that’s what’s happening here. And if it is what’s happening here then I think it really is, OK are they answering those first three questions pretty well? And in a way that’s setting them up so that they can do even better on questions four through six and then even better still on seven through 10? And again, I might turn out to be wrong, entirely wrong. I don’t want to be too rose-tinted glasses, even though that’s my thing.

[00:46:12.150] – Grumbine

It’s on your calling card. [laughter]

[00:46:14.210] – Hockett

You know, it’s kind of my job description in a sense, but in life. So I don’t want to be too much that way. But I think there’s some reason to hope because, again, it seems to me that Biden really thinks this way. In other words, it doesn’t seem to me like he’s just making nice with the Berniecrats.

In fact, that was the first major clue to me, was that after he won in November and then formed these agency review committees to start planning for the transition, he didn’t have to make nice with Berniecrats anymore to make sure that they would vote for him. He didn’t have to con us anymore. And yet I looked over the memberships, the names on those committees, and it was amazing.

I counted 25 people who he had on these committees who weren’t only people I just knew the identities of but were actual friends and fellow travelers of mine. Right? And I thought, holy crap, he seems really to want to find some kind of ground between the so-called center-left, i.e. the Republican left and the Bernie left or the AOC left. And I think maybe that’s what he’s still trying to do, Steve. Neera Tanden obviously was a really bad sign. [laughter]

[00:47:25.440] – Grumbine

Yes!

[00:47:26.280] – Hockett

Right. But there were some better signs, too. And I note that, of course, she’s no longer in the running. So I’m still feeling like we have some reason to hope here.

[00:47:36.540] – Grumbine

Let me take us down a slightly different path and see if your hope stays intact.

[00:47:40.680] – Hockett

OK.

[00:47:41.550] – Grumbine

One of the big concerns I have going back to 2008, 2009 in the Eric Holder/Obama years, with the Robert Rubins and the Hank Paulsons, with the collapse of the housing market and the entire financial system. We haven’t really dealt with that yet.

[00:47:58.395] – Hockett

Right.

[00:47:58.800] – Grumbine

And quite frankly, watching the way the CARES Act was handled, and watching how even the Arkansas Teacher’s Pensions that were brought before the Supreme Court here recently, and now you’ve got Giuliani being targeted.

[00:48:16.290] – Hockett

Uh-hum

[00:48:16.290] – Grumbine

And the elite control fraud that Bill Black has been at the front lines talking about forever…

[00:48:22.150] – Hockett

Decades, yeah.

[00:48:22.710] – Grumbine

Is not on anyone’s lips. The last time I heard anyone say it that had any power whatsoever was Bernie Sanders during his first run against Hillary Clinton. And then you didn’t hear another word about the casino world of Wall Street ever again. We have not heard any of it at all. There is no enforcement still. There is no real oversight.

There is a criminal syndicate backed up by the Fed. And Bill Black’s book, “The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One,” nobody’s proved it wrong yet. It’s still in play. And I think we talked about shadow banking. I do not see any appetite whatsoever to make right the wrongs of 2008, 2009, even now, as those entities remain whole, while people themselves are not.

And I see no effort whatsoever by this administration or quite frankly, any of our progressive squad members or any of the others to bring this to the forefront either. And this backstopping of this elite control fraud is going on unabated. And it proves and shows you what we’re up against with the MMT community.

And I wonder, what is it going to take for us to make that control fraud a something on this administration… Granted, first hundred days. But I don’t even hear talk about it. And I know for a fact my life has been radically turned on its head from this. What do you think it’s going to take to get this taken care of or will it ever?

[00:49:58.960] – Hockett

Here, too, I think there is a best-case scenario interpretation of what’s happening now that is not ruled out yet and might prove to be true. And there’s also, of course, a not such a great case scenario that could also turn out to be true. So I guess what I’ll do is I’ll draw your attention to some of the good signs to begin with and give a little bit of background context that explains why this might be good news, why at least it’s not necessarily bad news as of yet.

So as you know, most of the finance regulatory agencies that I tend to follow in my capacity as a finance regulation scholar, were kind of gutted or put on ice during those four years of Trump. There were a couple of token actions brought by the CFPB, for example, just so that Trump could say, “Oh, we’re still looking out for consumers in the financial markets and blah, blah, blah.”

But basically, when the CFPB was put under the control of Mick Mulvaney, chief of staff at the White House, it just ceased to function as a consumer financial protection agency. It just went dormant. And largely the same things happened at the CFTC, that’s the derivatives regulator, the SEC, the OCC, other financial regulators.

The only sound appointment, in fact, that Trump made – and all of us who follow these things are still scratching their heads over it – was Jerome Powell as Fed chair, who is not a lunatic. Right? Everybody wonders why it wasn’t Ivanka Trump who was appointed to be Fed chair. So we sort of dodged the bullet, you might say, with the Fed. Powell was the protege of Janet Yellen when she was Fed chair.

It was effectively like reappointing Janet Yellen. So that was good news, at least compared to what it might have been. It was pretty good news, right? But all the rest of the appointments were just a total disaster. And what seems to be happening now is all of these agencies are to be headed up by appointees who had pretty good track records in the past as serious regulators or people who are serious about financial regulation.

And the regulatory agencies seem to be gearing up and staffing up to take some major initiatives to crack down on various abuses, to promulgate new rules, to rule out various kinds of abuse and to be the kinds of agencies that they were founded in the first place – most of them during the New Deal era – to be.

And so I think there’s some possible good news here and that one reason we’re not seeing a lot of action there yet is that it takes more than a hundred days to staff up and put the agenda together and so on, right? But if you look at what’s happening at the CFPB right now and the gearing up that’s happening there, and if you look at what Gary Gensler is doing behind the scenes at the SEC, it’s looking like we’ve got some serious regulatory improvement in store.

And there are additional reasons to think that that’s the plan. One of them is that Mr. Biden does seem to be listening to Sherrod Brown a good bit on these kinds of matter. He seems to be listening to Maxine Waters a fair bit on these kinds of matter. And, of course, he’s listening to Elizabeth Warren.

So while I would never suggest that these agencies are going to be doing as much as and as good as you and I would like to see them do, I think we’re going to see them being much more serious than they’ve been since before even Jimmy Carter. You’ll probably see 1960s era regulatory zeal here, which is pretty good. It’s not great, but it’s pretty good.

That’s the best case scenario that isn’t ruled out yet, that there is some reason to expect to anticipate. Worst case scenario is that it just ends up being moderately pursued, new initiatives that they’re better than the Clinton era regulators were, but that that’s not saying much of anything. And things continue in the way that they were, let’s say, during the George H.W. Bush era or the Reagan era, something like that.

That’s possible, too. I don’t think that’s likely to happen, but I think it’s possible. When it comes to actually just going out and punishing, penalizing or prosecuting for some of the very fraud that took place in the lead up to ’08, I fear that that’s probably not going to happen, mainly owing to statutes of limitations, just that we’ve waited too bloody long now. Right?

[00:54:21.130] – Grumbine

It’s interesting you say that. I found this out just the other day. Not only did they pass laws that stopped you from being able to actually do the discovery back in the 90s, but then when it came time for the disclosures of the fraud from 2008-09, they also then in turn made this stuff go into a hush box, so to speak, with five-year limitations. Oh, by the way, it’s available for you in five years.

[00:54:47.470] – Hockett

Yeah, yeah.

[00:54:48.670] – Grumbine

This is absolute unbelievable collusion and the deepest of frauds and just seeing this…

[00:54:56.740] – Hockett

Yeah.

[00:54:56.740] – Grumbine

You don’t see any potential whatsoever for, let’s say a new Pecora hearing, hugh?

[00:55:03.100] – Hockett

Well, I mean, there could be. I see the potential for it, at least in the sense that exposure in hearings can itself have a salutary effect, even if statutes of limitations bar actual prosecutions under the criminal law. And so I could imagine such things happening. I think it’s probably unlikely, partly because I think my impression at least is that the administration wants to convey an image of being more forward-looking than backward-looking.

And I myself am somewhat troubled by some of that. So, for example, I think that the crimes that were rampant during the later Obama years and during the Trump years really ought to be pursued by the DOJ with a great deal of zeal right now. And I don’t see any sign that that’s happening.

I do see some hopeful signs from the DOJ in that Garland and others at the DOJ seem to be taking pretty seriously the prospect of reviving the civil rights law enforcement in dealing with some of these voter ID laws and voter disenfranchisement laws that are being passed in some of the more reactionary states now. They don’t look like they’re going to take this sitting down.

They seem to be pretty serious about returning racial equity to a central place on the national agenda, especially in connection with voting rights, but also in connection with other things. And they seem to be pretty serious, at least so far, about addressing racial wealth gaps, racial homeownership gaps, gender gaps and the like.

What’s interesting is here they are pursuing stuff that even the Obama administration would have played plenty of lip service to, but they seem to be taking actual actions. They seem to be actually literally gearing up for enforcement action, which I think is a pretty hopeful sign. Right. And there’s only so much that we can congratulate them for on that so far because not much has been done on the one hand, but on the other hand, there’s only so much you could have done in the first 100 days.

But it looks to me like they’re gearing up to get pretty serious in a proactive way about abuses of various kinds, both financial and civil rights abuses going forward. And that’s what I’ve been hanging my hat of hope on, you might say. I’ve kind of given up hope, or another way to say is I’ve basically embraced despair when it comes to…

[00:57:23.020] – Grumbine

I can relate

[00:57:24.490] – Hockett

…Going after those who committed crimes, let’s say before 2014 or so.

[00:57:30.430] – Grumbine

In talking with Bill Black, it’s become obvious to me that just because those crimes took place in the housing market, the same control fraud schemes are alive and well today, just in different sectors.

[00:57:46.010] – Hockett

Yeah.

[00:57:46.720] – Grumbine

And so my question is, I don’t even know if it’s a question at this point because you’ve answered the question. You don’t see the appetite for it then we look forward. But if that’s the case, this is a forward thing. It’s happening here now, not yesterday. There is a lot of things in place that make prosecuting control fraud almost impossible. They’ve done their best to eliminate the ability to really investigate these things.

[00:58:13.000] – Hockett

Um hum.

[00:58:13.000] – Grumbine

Legally speaking. I’m curious if you were to make a proposal for how we might be able to draw more attention to this, is there any way of bringing this out or is this just going to die under a pillow in silence?

[00:58:28.760] – Hockett

I think that there is a real prospect of making this a highly conspicuous national issue as a forward-looking thing. In other words, I think it’s possible at this point still in a sense, to mainstream Bill Black, to make the Bill Black vision something other than a marginal, cranky, prophetic voice crying in the wilderness to make it instead a focus, make his voice a mainstream voice by shifting the mainstream of enforcement in the financial space and adjacent spaces into a regime of the kind that Bill would pursue.

I think that there seems to be a certain ‘allergicness’ on the part of this administration to looking too far backward to go after people who did stuff like, let’s say, seven years ago or longer. But I think there seems to be a real seriousness about what to do going forward.

And again, that might turn out just to be wrong, but it’s kind of looking that way to me, given some of the choices that have been made to head up the agencies, given the announced plans from those agencies and given – a Freudian slip there, I almost said Obama – given Biden’s announced intention not to let Wall Street be calling the shots on the economy.

There are two good signs on that latter point, by the way. And again, these might just be window dressing, so I don’t want to over-read them. But there are at least good signs this early on. So one is that even floating the idea of raising corporate taxes and raising the top marginal rates and also equalizing capital gains rates to income tax rates so that you don’t get out of paying your taxes by being a rentier, by being somebody who just owns a bunch of stuff.

That’s essentially a gauntlet being thrown down to Wall Street, even to announce that stuff. It’s a “up yours, Wall Street” act. Now, again, it could be just window dressing because after all, Obama did go and appear on Wall Street shortly after taking office in 2009 and said, “I’m the only person standing between you and the pitchforks.” And then we ended up throwing out the pitchfork.

So I don’t want to read too much into it. But there seems to be a certain seriousness here so far. And the appointments so far look to be in keeping with that announced intention or announced attitude. The second one is and again, this might just be nothing more than window dressing, but when he said, “Wall Street didn’t build this country, Main Street did,” and that “it’s workers who built this up,” he seems to be being true to that blue collar Joe thing, right?

And I think he might really mean it, Steve, for the reasons we talked about before. But again, that might just be symbolic. I hope it’s not. So far it’s looking to me like it’s not. His principal economic advisers have pretty good track records on these things, too. They don’t seem to be the usual Wall Street economist types.

Jared Bernstein used to be the lone voice of the wilderness during the Obama years. Now his is the dominant view on the economic team. And it’s interesting that his role of the Obama administration was that of Joe Biden’s chief economist. So maybe that was a clue all along that Biden would be a better president on this stuff than Obama.

But like you, I’m going to be watching pretty carefully because we’ve been fooled many a time with the window dressing and the pretty speeches. And the “I’m standing between you and the pitchforks” line that ends up meaning nothing. My eyes are open to that, too. But so far it’s looking like the real thing to me. So I’m pretty hopeful even without being dogmatically hopeful.

[01:02:07.760] – Grumbine

Well, I got to thank you so much for the time, Bob. These are tough ones. I want nothing but the best. So I take my role seriously to try my best to be – I don’t want to say ‘fair and balanced’ because I think that’s a cop-out. But I think at least not hyperbolic…

[01:02:25.130] – Hockett

Um hum

[01:02:25.130] – Grumbine

…In these interviews. Now I may be hyperbolic on Twitter, but that’s a different story.

[01:02:29.030] – Hockett

Right.

[01:02:29.900] – Grumbine

But in terms of my presence on this podcast, I think it’s important that I bring voices forward that have knowledge, not necessarily everybody that I always agree with 100 percent. And I’ve gone on record saying so far, I don’t share your optimism. I’m trying because I think you’re a man who has great insights. And so I’m trying to see things a different way. But my spidey senses tell me, “don’t look away. Don’t look away.” [laugh]

[01:02:59.240] – Hockett

Don’t look the other way. Yeah, there’s no question that we have to stay quite vigilant here. And again, as usual, it’s quite possible that I’m over-optimisticly reading the very little data that we have thus far, partly out of a desire to be hopeful and to see hope vindicated, and partly out of coloration of this framing effect being exerted by the low bar.

[01:03:21.940] – Grumbine

Yes, I think we’re all suffering from ‘low bar-itis’ right now.

[01:03:25.320] – Hockett

Yeah. Yeah.

[01:03:26.840] – Grumbine

Well, anyway, you’ve been a great guest, as always, and I look forward to talking to you again in the future. And I just really want to thank you so much for taking the time with me, because I know you’re very busy.

[01:03:37.460] – Hockett

Thank you, my friend. I know you’re extremely busy, too. And thanks for finding some time for me on this and much more to come. We’ll talk a lot more. I know we’ll probably be comparing notes every couple of weeks or so as this thing goes forward.

[01:03:47.930] – Grumbine

You got it, man. Thank you so much. Folks, this is Steve Grumbine, Robert Hockett, Macro N Cheese. We’re out of here.

[01:04:00.840] – Ending credits

Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts, and promotional artwork by Mindy Donham. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.

Mentioned in the podcast:

Joe Manchin    

Pramila Jayapal  

The Matrix cast   

Kyrsten Sinema  

Scylla and Charybdis   

Digital Greenbacks by Robert Hockett 

 Fintech 

 M and B  

 Newtek  

CARES Act 

Arkansas Teachers vs. Goldman Sachs 

Bill Black and Control Fraud 

Video of Bill Black discussing The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One 

CFPB 

Mick Mulvaney 

Commodities Futures Trading Commission 

SEC Securities and Exchange Commission  

Office of the Comptroller of the Currency 

Janet Yellen 

Jerome Powell 

Gary Gensler at the SEC 

Sherrod Brown 

Robert Hockett contributions to Forbes

Financing the Green New Deal: A Plan of Action and Renewal by Robert Hockett

Money From Nothing by Robert Hockett and Aaron James

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