Eggs, Lies and Gasoline

Last Sunday Kevin Hassett — chair of the National Economic Council, effectively the Trump administration’s chief economist — was interviewed by Nancy Cordes for CBS’s Face the Nation. Most observers expect Hassett to be appointed as the next chair of the Federal Reserve. Prediction markets give him a virtual lock:

So CBS was probably hoping that he would say something newsworthy. He didn’t.

But he did, in just a few sentences, make it clear that he is absolutely unqualified — intellectually and morally — to be Fed chair. And the fact that nobody took notice, that his ignorance and mendacity were accepted as par for the course, demonstrated just how far our standards for public service have been degraded.

Here’s the exchange that caught my eye:

NANCY CORDES: What’s your advice to holiday shoppers who don’t want to spend more this year than they did last year, or can’t afford to spend more?

HASSETT: Right. Well, as you know, it depends on what you’re looking at. Like egg prices are down. Gasoline prices drop below $2 a gallon in a lot of places, mortgage rates are down—

NANCY CORDES: --you mean below- gas prices on average are still at $3 a gallon.

HASSETT: Yeah that’s right for a few states they got below two.

Given the timidity of legacy media these days, Trump officials need to be really out there to get fact-checked in real time. But Cordes was right: average national gas prices are around $3 a gallon. And contra Hassett, there are no states in which gas prices are below $2, or even close:

Was Hassett lying, or just unaware of basic facts? Neither is what you want to see in a man who may soon be overseeing monetary policy.

Furthermore, if you’re trying to assess economic policy, it’s hard to come up with worse indicators than the prices of eggs and gasoline. Egg prices fluctuate wildly, not in response to policy changes, but because of the coming and going of bird flu. Gasoline prices mainly reflect the global price of crude oil, a price on which U.S. policy has at most a marginal influence.

So what are we to make of Hassett boasting about prices he should be ignoring if he becomes Fed chair?

Look, I’m not naïve. I understand that when you work for the president — any president — you’re expected to make the