Santelli Warns: Prices Aren’t Going Back Down Any Time Soon

BUCK: Welcome back to Clay and Buck. I’m Buck. He’s Clay.

BUCK: That was Rick Santelli — the man who called for the Tea Party from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange back in 2010 — just speaking what I think is gonna end up being somewhat prophetic here. Prices aren’t going back down, folks. When Biden starts talking about lowering costs, I get really concerned. If you want to see a case study of government intervention in the markets by setting price controls, that’s what happened in Venezuela that really started to tank their economy.

So I hope they know that we can’t do that. That would be, like, full-on socialist lunacy. But these days when you hear them talking about how they want to tackle inflation by spending more money, inflation is a problem of monetary policy, and inflation is a problem of government spending. This is Econ 101. And yet, Clay, we get Democrats like Biden coming out to tell us that their policies of spending more money are actually helping. It’s like arguing with crazy people.

CLAY: Joe Biden made one of the signature issues of his campaign that the adults would be in charge again and that he would take responsibility for everything that occurred on his watch. Yet what we’re seeing Joe Biden do time after time is find different explanations for why inflation is not his fault. And if you remember, I believe inflation was 1.9% when he took over in January of 2021. I think I’m correct in that. We’re now at 8.5% inflation.

So everything that he has done has accelerated what would have likely been a larger inflation related issue. Buck, I don’t think we’re talking enough about Shanghai and the lockdowns that are still going on there and how that’s going to continue to impact and exacerbate all of our supply chain crisis issues. We may be far worse… You’re already seeing it with things that are important like baby formula. We may be far worse when it comes to supply issues in this country in the summer and the fall than we have been so far. I think that’s likely.

BUCK: I hate to say it, but Bare Shelves Biden was mostly a meme people were using to poke at the Biden administration for being incompetent, but it could really be a thing. I mean, Bare Shelves Biden might be something that goes from look at what a bunch of idiots we have running the country to, “Oh, my God. I actually can’t buy stuff that I really need,” like baby formula, by the way, but on a much broader scale than even that.

CLAY: And what that scarcity does is create more scarcity ’cause if you’re a mom right now and you see baby formula on the shelf, like what we saw happen with toilet paper, you buy as much as you can which makes the situation worse.

BUCK: Yeah.