BREAKDOWN: The Anxiety Index... 4 Fear Factors Shaping the Economy
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 28 August 2020
⏱️ 16 minutes
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Summary
From COVID-19 relapses to election insecurity, these factors drive defensiveness up and demand down.
This episode is sponsored by Crypto.com, Bitstamp and Nexo.io.
Today on the Brief:
- Skepticism around Powell’s inflation prognostications
- The Tesla Stock Split Game
- China’s COVID-19 vaccine maker presses countries for early adoption
Our main discussion: The Anxiety Index
We live in an economy organized around consumption and perpetual growth. In that context, factors that cause consumers to be fearful, reduce spending, increase savings, move less and generally slow down can wreak havoc.
In this episode, NLW discusses four factors shaping and driving consumer anxiety, including:
- COVID-19 related concerns, both health and economic
- Monetary policy questions
- U.S.-China tensions
- Election insecurity
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You take all these factors together, and whatever the historical anxiety index is, we have to be extremely high on that scale right now. |
| 0:08.0 | When that happens, there's going to be a fundamental slowing, a shift to focusing on defensiveness, a shift to focusing on building resilience, |
| 0:17.0 | an unwillingness to move more quickly to take risk to make bets. That's a really hard |
| 0:22.5 | place to jumpstart an economy from. Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on |
| 0:31.7 | macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. The breakdown is sponsored by Crypto., bitstamp, and nexo.io, and produced and distributed by |
| 0:42.3 | CoinDesk. |
| 0:44.8 | What's going on, guys? |
| 0:46.3 | It is Friday, August 28th, and today we are talking about the anxiety index. |
| 0:53.5 | This is four fear factors shaping the economy. |
| 0:58.4 | First, however, let's do the brief. First up on the brief today, more reactions to Powell's |
| 1:04.3 | speech. So Jay Powell gave a speech yesterday on the new direction of the Federal Reserve, |
| 1:12.8 | which, as we'll see, is mostly a lot of the same direction, but in a slightly more accentuated way. And that's kind of the |
| 1:18.6 | point, is that we're now 24 hours on, and the reaction was a whole lot of meh. Bloomberg's |
| 1:24.7 | headline was, the Fed's new plan to lift inflation faces skepticism. And I've |
| 1:29.8 | pulled a few quotes from that and other sources that I think reflect the general attitude. |
| 1:34.9 | The chief economist at Jeffrey says, the Fed needs to articulate very clearly how they plan to |
| 1:40.0 | achieve the new objective. Otherwise, these are just words on paper and don't really mean anything. |
| 1:44.6 | Referring to the toolbox from 2008 that has been redeployed, Robert Purley of Cornerstone |
| 1:51.7 | Macro said, these tools took us out of the Great Recession but did not generate inflation. |
| 1:57.0 | It is possible that the Fed intends to use these tools in stronger doses, but even so, |
| 2:01.6 | there is reason to believe that the power of those tools may be lower today than it was years |
| 2:05.6 | ago. |
... |
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