"And so we have to be careful with looking at additional stimulus that we don't provoke an increase in the bond rate and then offset a lot of the stimulus we've already got"
About this Quote
A bureaucratic caution wrapped in market realism, Raines is drawing a boundary around what counts as "help" in an economy already leaning hard on policy support. The sentence is built like a warning label: stimulus can backfire if it spooks bond investors, lifts interest rates, and quietly taxes the very recovery it is meant to accelerate. He is not arguing against stimulus as a concept so much as against stimulus as theater - the kind that feels bold in headlines but gets repriced in the bond market by lunchtime.
The specific intent is technocratic triage. "We have to be careful" signals a speaker positioning himself as the adult in the room, fluent in the plumbing. The real subject isn't jobs programs or relief checks; it's the cost of capital. By foregrounding "the bond rate", Raines places creditors and inflation expectations at the center of the policy conversation. That's the subtext: in a financialized economy, government ambition is constrained not only by voters and legislators but by investors' tolerance for risk and future price growth.
Context matters because this is the language of the late-90s/early-2000s consensus, where credibility with markets became synonymous with responsibility. The phrase "offset a lot of the stimulus we've already got" reveals an almost Newtonian worldview: policy pushes, markets push back. It's a neat rhetorical move, too: it recasts restraint as pragmatism, making the bond market an invisible co-author of fiscal policy rather than a constituency with interests of its own.
The specific intent is technocratic triage. "We have to be careful" signals a speaker positioning himself as the adult in the room, fluent in the plumbing. The real subject isn't jobs programs or relief checks; it's the cost of capital. By foregrounding "the bond rate", Raines places creditors and inflation expectations at the center of the policy conversation. That's the subtext: in a financialized economy, government ambition is constrained not only by voters and legislators but by investors' tolerance for risk and future price growth.
Context matters because this is the language of the late-90s/early-2000s consensus, where credibility with markets became synonymous with responsibility. The phrase "offset a lot of the stimulus we've already got" reveals an almost Newtonian worldview: policy pushes, markets push back. It's a neat rhetorical move, too: it recasts restraint as pragmatism, making the bond market an invisible co-author of fiscal policy rather than a constituency with interests of its own.
Quote Details
| Topic | Money |
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