Robert Hockett

Professor of Law

“Corporate profit growth rates, now at an all-time high, are leading the Consumer Price Inflation rate, while wage and salary growth rates are lagging it. Why, then, are we targeting the latter and doing nothing about the former? 

“The answer is that officialdom falsely believes 'all we have is a hammer' – the Fed – and accordingly sees even glue tasks and staple tasks as nail tasks. We have far more tools than our 'Fed hammer', though – in particular, tools to ramp up domestic goods production and tamp down price gouging and windfall petroleum profits. 

“Mr. Powell's Fed must therefore stay its hand, while Mr. Biden accelerates America's reindustrialization, taxes away price-gouging profits, and asserts public control over domestic petroleum production – still the largest in the world – just as the OPEC countries have done.”