Did Monetary Policy Help Trump Win The White House?

Did monetary policy help President-elect Donald Trump win the race to the White House? According to billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller, the answer is a simple yes.

"Of course it did,"Druckenmiller said on Thursday's edition of CNBC's "Squawk Box."

"It was just a small part of it. But of course it did because it caused a massive reallocation of wealth."

The CNBC Team Debates

Steve Liesman, CNBC's senior economics reporter, offered his take later on in the day.

"I Googled: 'Has the Federal Reserve hurt savers?' and a whole lot of things came up — pages of it," Liesman said. "Then I Googled 'Has the Federal Reserve helped borrowers?' and almost nothing came up."

Liesman continued that there are two sides to the argument. On the one hand, the Federal Reserve has hurt savers by lowering interest rates, but at the same time low interest rates have helped borrowers quite a bit.

Liesman went on to point out that Trump said during the campaign that the Federal Reserve's policies reflect a partisan stance that stands against his message of improving the lives of average Americans.

He further noted that the argument certainly can be made that the Fed's policy has helped the ultra-rich dis-proportionally compared to other income groups given the tremendous gains seen across various asset classes over the many years.

This merely adds to the perception that the rich have gotten richer over the years, while average Americans haven't seen the same upside in their own financial well-beings.

"There are two sides to this story," Liesman concluded. "Maybe we have reached a point where we have helped borrowers as much as we can, and its time to help savers more. There is something to that as well."

Image Credit: By Donald Trump Transition Team (https://www.greatagain.gov/) [CC BY 4.0] via Wikimedia Commons.