Program:  Cavuto Coast to Coast
Date:  12/29/2021
Station:  Fox Business News
Time:  12:00PM

DAVID ASMAN: The Biden administration’s push to solve inflation, meanwhile, by cracking down on businesses using antitrust violations, essentially blaming businesses instead of government for inflation may actually cause bigger inflation issues. This, according to a Democrat, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. He tweeted out quote the emerging claim that antitrust can combat inflation reflects science denial. There are many areas like transitory inflation where serious economists differ. But antitrust as an anti inflation strategy is not one of them. Joining me now is Kingsview Asset Management CIO Scott Martin and Point Bridge Capital founder and CEO Hal Lambert. Good to see you, gentlemen. Thanks for being here. Scott, you got to hand it to Larry Summers. So I mean, he’s going against the woke crowd on this one. That’s that’s brave to do for a Democrat.

SCOTT MARTIN: Looking outside the box, Larry, and thank you for

ASMAN: looking inside of this argument.

MARTIN: Well, yeah, inside, but then wanting to jump out of the box is David, as far as figuring out the right way to deal with this and we do have evidence. I mean, Larry Summers hit on some of the science of it. I mean, let’s just look at history in the last two year, the war that the Biden administration put on the oil industry let the closing of the pipelines, other special assessments, other rhetoric, other talk against the industry. And look, what’s happened to gas prices and supply. So if you look at it going forward, especially, you say the meat industry, could we just have the government to just leave the businesses alone? Look at what’s already happened to what the government has done for the businesses with respect to the COVID breakout? And now they’re going to come in with regulations and any kind of trapping, let’s say, on some of these businesses as far as how they should operate going forward looks terrible for the consumer. It’s going to drive up costs because supply is going to go down.

ASMAN: Hal, let’s face it, this is an anti-business administration. I mean, there’s no getting around it. There aren’t business people in the administration. I can’t think of one offhand. Maybe there are one or two, but I can’t see any and there does. There literally seems to be an anti-capitalist mentality. And also in an attempt to divert blame that they have their own responsibility for creating inflation through deficit spending and all sorts of things and putting it on the backs of businesses, right?

HAL LAMBERT: Oh, absolutely, I mean, this administration is filled with academics and lifelong bureaucrats that have never created a job in the private sector, none of them have, including the president and the vice president. So they don’t have a clue how to create jobs. So yes, they are trying to play the blame game and blame the businesses for their failures. It’s not going to work. And what Larry Summers is basically saying is, look, get off the campaign trail and get real. And let’s look at the real causes of this inflation. Now, I don’t I don’t agree with Larry’s assessment of it. He thinks it’s because we need to outsource more jobs to China and take tariffs off of China. That’s his solution for it. He thinks we have a worker shortage. Well, we do have a worker shortage because of the policies of this administration to basically create a universal income and pay people not to work. So we have a worker shortage that creates higher prices in labor and causes people to sit home. And they’re handing out money and people are spending money and it’s driving up prices because we don’t have a supply chain that can handle it. That’s the that’s the reason for this. It’s all their policies. And that’s that’s what they don’t want to admit. And they’re going to continue to play the blame game all through 2022 as we go into the next election.

ASMAN: All right. But very quickly, Scott, we only have about 10 seconds here, but there is a tool that scares me that they may pull out, and that’s price controls that always leads to shortages. Do you think they’re going to use that next?

MARTIN: I do insert awkward Kamala Harris laugh here, because any kind of price controls take away the free market, David, and that hurts consumers in the end.

ASMAN: Empty shelves. That’s what price controls lead to, gentlemen. We’ll be seeing more of you.