Neel Kashkari certainly won’t be promoted to Federal Reserve Chairman when Jerome Powell’s term ends next year. The Minneapolis Fed chief told an Elevate Rapid City Town hall that we were beating inflation until King Donald came back:
He said the fed was making progress towards its 2% inflation goal until early this year.
“Tariffs threw a curveball at us,” Kashkari said.
He said part of the problem is that the cost of goods goes up, but how high…how long prices go up…and if it spreads to other areas of the economy aside from goods are also major factors.
“The short answer is so far, it’s too soon to know for sure,” Kashkari said [Jackson Dierks, “Minneapolis Federal Reserve President Says South Dakotans Feeling Inflation,” SDPB, 2025.10.20].
Kashkari maintains that tariffs won’t have exert big long-term effects on inflation and argues for more rate cuts to address the weakening labor market. But without tariffs monkey-wrenching global economic stability, we could have had those rate cuts, lower inflation, and good old market certainty sooner.
Self-reliance or moral hazard? Creighton University’s Ernie Goss and his Rural Mainstreet Index have been warning of collapse for months.
Back in 2018 Republicans like Senator John Thune (Earth hater-SD) were calling Trump tariffs a “Band-Aid” and a “false sense of security” especially for farm states. Again in January Thune was still pessimistic that the incoming Trump administration had the political capital to end the gains under Bidenomics.
Now, panic is sweeping American agriculture as bankers and monolithic corporations keep producers trapped in a death spiral and a soybean plant recently opened in Mitchell is already circling Trump’s tariff drain.