Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. This is Declan Garvey, editor of the Morning Dispatch.

And today we have a great conversation with Desmond Lockman. He's a senior fellow at the American

Enterprise Institute. We're going to talk to Desmond about macroeconomic policy. He had latest

inflation reports, the federal reserves, latest interest rate moves, and kind of what we can expect

going forward into 2023, as we're in this now years long fight against inflation and

potentially ending up in a recession.

Desmond, thank you so much for joining the Dispatch podcast.

My pleasure to be with you.

Well, I want to get started. Just we've had kind of a banner week of economic news in the past

week between the Consumer Price Index report coming out last Tuesday, and then the Federal Reserve

making an interest rate decision and Chairman Jerome Powell making kind of letting investors and

the market know where the Fed is trending towards in the coming weeks. So could you walk us through

briefly kind of your takeaways from those two announcements that came back to back?

So the response that consumer prices go that was pretty good news. You know, what occurred

is that earlier this summer, we peaked inflation at around about 9.1%. The consumer numbers on last

week showed that we down to 7.1%. And that was better than expected. So it looks like clearly

inflation has peaked that we're on a declining trend. Now, having said that, the Federal Reserve

Chairman Jerome Powell, the following week, disabuse us of any notion that the Fed is finished

with interest rate hikes. So he felt that we've still got quite a lot of wage pressure in the system

that unemployment is very low and that the Fed still has work to do in terms of raising interest

rates. So what they did is they raised interest rates by 50 basis points. That's lower than the 75

basis points that they did on the previous four occasions. But it's still very aggressive monetary

...