Following the Labor Department’s disappointing report that only 38,000 jobs were added in May, the Federal Reserve decided on June 15, 2016, they would not raise interest rates.
CNBC Squawk Box co-anchor Joe Kernen reacted to the Fed’s decision the following morning. He criticized them for only raising interest rates once in the past nine years.
When co-anchor Andrew Ross Sorkin mentioned the Federal Reserve indicated “a slower pace of interest rate hikes,” Kernen asked, “How do you get slower?”
Kernen blasted the decision saying, “When you’ve got one rate increase in nine years, what is the pace of that, other than glacial? Other than not believing anything they say, other than not having any credibility whatsoever at this point.”
Fellow co-anchor Becky Quick informed Kernen that CNBC’s Steve Liesman thought the Fed was “capitulating” prompting him to ask, “The rate hike cycle is over at one? At a quarter point the rate hike cycle is over?”
“This is all indicating some very strange - I don't want to call it the new normal - I want to call it the Reinhart-Rogoff idea is wrong, and it’s now self-inflicted,” Kernen said of the refusal to raise interest rates.
Kernen also called it “over-regulation” because “it's not doing the things that are necessary to get economies moving anymore.”
When Quick argued that the United States’ economy was being “hampered by global growth,” Kernen countered, “We could lead global growth.”
