Waters: Raising Interest Rates ‘Has Not Been Working’ and May Cause a Recession, But It’s ‘All that We Have’ to Fight Inflation

On Saturday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Velshi,” House Financial Services Committee Ranking Member Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) stated that raising interest rates to lower inflation “has not been working in the way that it should.” And “it doesn’t look good right now. We may be in for a recession.” But interest rate hikes are “all that we have as a traditional way of containing inflation” and “We don’t have” an answer to lower inflation.

Waters said, “[R]aising interest rates is the traditional way. It is supposedly the intellectual way. It is the way by which you contain inflation. It has not been working in the way that it should. Now, what he did — what Powell did in this last raise was he tried to keep it low to 25 basis points. But, of course, it doesn’t look good right now. We may be in for a recession. And he’s got to do everything that he possibly can. Everybody’s got to weigh in. If there is a better answer, we’ve got to find it. We’ve got to find that answer. We don’t have it now. This is all that we have as a traditional way of containing inflation, is a rise in interest rates. I don’t like it. My constituents don’t like it. Young people who want to buy a house don’t like it because the interest rates are just too high. There are some people, of course, who make money off of rising interest rates, but the average person does not. And so, no, we’re in a point in time in the history of our economics that the answers do not appear to be there, but we’ve got to do everything that we can to bring down inflation and contain the rise in interest rates.”

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