The Ben Shapiro Show - September 17, 2026


The Fed Just Raised Rates. Here's What It Means for You.

Iran Just Tightened Its Grip on Global Oil

Episode Stats


Length

14 minutes

Words per minute

198.92

Word count

2,934

Sentence count

211

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Also mentioned:

Harmful content

Toxicity

7

sentences flagged

Hate speech

11

sentences flagged


Transcript

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00:00:00.000 The Fed just raised rates.
00:00:01.000 If you find yourself wondering why that is happening, well, I am here to explain from treasury yields to gas prices in Hormuz to government spending.
00:00:10.000 It's worth breaking down all the confusing headlines because our economy, well, it's not in great shape.
00:00:15.000 The Federal Reserve decided to increase the interest rates yesterday by a quarter point.
00:00:21.000 So you may recall that President Trump pushed extremely, extremely hard to get rid of Fed Chair Jerome Powell, who's pissed at Powell specifically because Powell would not.
00:00:33.000 He said that Powell was keeping those interest rates too high.
00:00:33.000 Lower the interest rates.
00:00:35.000 The president wanted injections of liquidity into the economy.
00:00:39.000 He said, We've got the inflation under control.
00:00:40.000 Powell's like, I don't know that we got the inflation under control so much.
00:00:43.000 And Trump was like, No, we need someone in there right now who's going to inject liquidity in the economy, make it easier for the dollars to flow.
00:00:50.000 So he pushed very hard for Powell to go.
00:00:53.000 Powell's term expired.
00:00:54.000 And then he inserted Kevin Warsh.
00:00:56.000 Well, now, Kevin Warsh.
00:00:57.000 So again, just want to point out now, Kevin Warsh was supposed to be the cat's paw of the president, right?
00:01:03.000 When he was appointed.
00:01:04.000 Every Democrat suggested that Fed Chair Kevin Walsh would do exactly what Trump wanted him to do.
00:01:08.000 Well, his first major decision was to increase the interest rates for the first time in three years.
00:01:13.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates Wednesday for the first time in three years, a sharp reversal that began taking back cuts it made last year and implicitly undercut the White House's insistence that inflation isn't a concern.
00:01:26.000 The increase was approved unanimously.
00:01:28.000 It raises the benchmark federal funds rate range by a quarter point to between 3.75 and 4%.
00:01:34.000 Again, the vast majority of officials say that there will be yet another rate hike before the end of the year.
00:01:39.000 So the president, I would imagine, is going to be pissed off at this because when you increase the interest rates, you make it harder for people to take out loans.
00:01:47.000 It has an impact on the stock market and all the rest.
00:01:50.000 So why are we doing this?
00:01:51.000 Well, I mean, the answer is pretty obvious.
00:01:52.000 The U.S. inflation rate has not actually gone down.
00:01:54.000 The annualized inflation rate is basically stuck in the mid threes at this point.
00:01:59.000 As you can see from the chart, the inflation rate, like you want it to be at about 2%, that is the goal for the Fed.
00:02:04.000 It was at 3.3 in March, 3.8 in April, 4.2 in May, back down to 3.5 in June, 3.4 in July, and 3.4 in August on an annualized basis.
00:02:13.000 So it's still more than 50% too high.
00:02:17.000 So, one reason is inflation remains high.
00:02:19.000 The second is that treasury yields have been spiking beyond belief.
00:02:21.000 So, a treasury yield is the difference between the price of a T-bill, the price of a bond, and the actual facial return you get on the bond.
00:02:28.000 So, when the price is dumped, the yield goes up.
00:02:30.000 So, the yield is really high, meaning nobody's kind of buying our bonds right now.
00:02:35.000 How do you drop inflation?
00:02:36.000 Well, you suck money out of the economy by increasing interest rates, the overnight interest rates.
00:02:40.000 It means that people take out less credit because they don't want to be charged that interest rate.
00:02:45.000 And you also secondarily create the incentive for the Treasury Department to compete with the return to be got on savings by increasing the interest rate on T-bills.
00:02:52.000 So you're sort of pushing them to increase the interest rates on T-bills, on facial interest rates, on, say, three-month T-bills, to increase the marketability of those T-bills and drop the yields.
00:03:03.000 This is why the Treasury yields decline ahead of Warsh's decision.
00:03:06.000 People were anticipating slowing in the economy.
00:03:08.000 And the idea is to move from the markets to the T-bills.
00:03:12.000 That's what the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday.
00:03:15.000 The 10-year yield retreated just below 5%.
00:03:18.000 The NASDAQ and the SP 500 traded higher with the Dow flat.
00:03:21.000 Brent crude futures were down more than 2% at $106 a barrel.
00:03:24.000 Here was Kevin Warsh defending his decision, saying that the action was consistent with stable prices.
00:03:30.000 Thanks so much, Elizabeth Schulze with ABC News.
00:03:33.000 Big picture, I wonder if you could tell us just what this move today will actually do for American consumers and have to ask.
00:03:39.000 What is your message here to President Trump, who has repeatedly called to cut interest rates, not raise them?
00:03:46.000 I've got nothing for you on a discussion with the president, but I won't make that count as your question.
00:03:53.000 On the American people, as I said in my prepared remarks, the least well off are the ones who have the most to gain from stable prices.
00:04:02.000 The decision we made today was the right decision to deliver on the remit that Congress gave us to ensure stable prices.
00:04:10.000 Moreover, I would say because of the underlying strength of the economy, because we are, as I mentioned, largely acting consistent with full employment.
00:04:20.000 We can be focused on stable prices.
00:04:23.000 Some months ago, I said we will deliver stable prices.
00:04:26.000 Today's action is consistent with that.
00:04:27.000 So, again, the goal is to maintain stability in prices.
00:04:32.000 Good shot that the president is going to come after Kevin Walsh, be a little unhappy, shall we say, with Kevin Walsh.
00:04:39.000 Now, the chances on Kalshi as of yesterday that Trump was going to go after Walsh are pretty high.
00:04:43.000 They spiked from like the mid 30s all the way up to like the mid 60s that he would go after Walsh sometime between sometime before January 1st of 2026.
00:04:53.000 The likely possibility of another Fed rate increase in October, that maintains.
00:05:01.000 The Calchie market suggests about a 52% chance that the Fed will maintain the rate, and essentially the same chances that the Fed will hike by 25 basis points.
00:05:12.000 Nobody thinks that the Fed is going to cut the interest rates.
00:05:14.000 So this gets to the continued inflation.
00:05:17.000 So why are we getting the inflation?
00:05:19.000 Obviously, oil has something to do with it, of course.
00:05:21.000 And that looks like it might get worse, not better.
00:05:23.000 In the short term, given the fact that there are Houthi attacks on Saudi pipelines and that they took over the Babel Mandab Strait, as we mentioned yesterday on the show, the Saudi military basically did nothing because they are incompetent.
00:05:33.000 And then they begged America to help, and America said no. 0.63
00:05:35.000 And now they're busy begging the Israelis, who they claim are horrible monsters for Gaza, to help them fight off the Houthis, which is some irony since they have a defense pact with Pakistan and Turkey.
00:05:45.000 It's not going very well.
00:05:47.000 So those Brent crude prices jumped to about $106 a barrel yesterday.
00:05:51.000 Now, if you take a look at the six month view of Brent crude, Again, you see that it's been spiking again since basically the beginning of August.
00:05:59.000 It came down pretty substantially at the end of August.
00:06:02.000 And since then, it's been on an upward trajectory.
00:06:04.000 So obviously, that is having a bleed over effect into prices.
00:06:08.000 The amount of Hormuz outbound oil flow from Iran, UAE, Saudi Iraq, and Kuwait remains lower than it was before the war, pretty obviously.
00:06:16.000 But again, this isn't all oil.
00:06:17.000 That's definitely part of it, but it is not all oil.
00:06:19.000 It's also tariffs, of course, which have been spiking prices since basically they were implemented.
00:06:25.000 And the biggest part of a systemic Inflation problem is a massive structural deficit that requires us to continue taking out debt.
00:06:33.000 We'll get to more on this in a moment.
00:06:35.000 First, the healthiest version of you is apparently the person who shops for groceries on Sunday because you go to the store and you buy the spinach and the berries and all the vegetables you're definitely going to eat.
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00:07:40.000 Our structural deficit is extraordinarily high.
00:07:43.000 If you take a look at the net interest that we are paying on the national debt, it is higher than it really has ever been.
00:07:53.000 It is likely to continue to go up.
00:07:56.000 This is going to be exacerbated by the fact that we have a bipartisan agreement in this country to keep spending money, to never stop spending money.
00:08:03.000 This goes back to something the president did last week at his rally at the RNC in Dallas.
00:08:09.000 Here he was talking about just dumping $5,000 checks on everybody.
00:08:12.000 I mean, you know what creates inflation?
00:08:14.000 Helicopter money.
00:08:16.000 If the Republicans win, if you win, we might not win.
00:08:20.000 The reason the Democrats can't do that is because they don't do tariffs, they don't take in money.
00:08:26.000 All they know is poverty and how to ruin our country.
00:08:28.000 But we're making a fortune.
00:08:30.000 So if the Republicans win, you win with us and you get $5,000.
00:08:36.000 It will be called the Trump dividend.
00:08:40.000 We'll call it the Trump dividend.
00:08:42.000 Now, again, that's likely not going to happen.
00:08:47.000 I pointed this out on CNN with Jake Tapper that the president likes to kind of throw out these big promises and then it kind of never gets filled in.
00:08:54.000 But even the fact that we keep talking about spending like this is insane.
00:08:57.000 Here's Mike Johnson saying kind of the same thing.
00:09:00.000 For that $5,000 check, doesn't the president need Congress to act?
00:09:05.000 And are you going to carry out his wishes?
00:09:10.000 I would assume, yes, he'd need Congress to act.
00:09:12.000 And that's a A creative idea.
00:09:15.000 He launched it at our convention and got a lot of people excited.
00:09:19.000 Of course, devil's in the details.
00:09:21.000 We have to figure all that out.
00:09:22.000 But I think what he was articulating there, Jay, is that he's saying that if you want more money in your pocket, you have to keep Republicans in charge.
00:09:29.000 Why?
00:09:29.000 Because we're talking about the record of achievement.
00:09:32.000 Look at what we've done since President Trump took over.
00:09:34.000 Republicans have had control of the House and Senate.
00:09:36.000 We have the largest working and middle class tax cut in U.S. history.
00:09:42.000 So, again, You know, if you continue to dump money out the back door, you're going to get inflation.
00:09:47.000 If you keep talking about dumping money out the back door, then you're likely to get people who do not want to buy your D bills.
00:09:52.000 This is why Ron DeSantis went after the $5,000 checks.
00:09:55.000 He said, if you're getting surplus revenue, you should cut people's tax and return it to the people.
00:09:59.000 What I don't think you want to do is borrow another $1.5 trillion and then just try to flood that into the economy.
00:10:03.000 That's going to lead to more inflation.
00:10:04.000 That will lead to more debt and more inflation. 0.65
00:10:07.000 Now, the biggest problem that we have, you know, again, we have a uniparty in this country.
00:10:11.000 The uniparty is let's spend more money.
00:10:13.000 Jessica Tarlov, who is of the left, thinks that budgets are moral documents.
00:10:19.000 I mean, I actually do not believe that budgets are predominantly moral documents.
00:10:24.000 I think typically they're an argument about what you can afford and where you ought to allocate those resources.
00:10:28.000 I think to a certain extent that's true.
00:10:30.000 I think you decide to allocate all your money to abortion.
00:10:32.000 That says something about your morality, obviously.
00:10:35.000 But if the idea is that you are more moral if your budget is bigger, we got a problem.
00:10:38.000 Right.
00:10:39.000 Like Trumpism is a moral failing.
00:10:41.000 And I agree with that.
00:10:43.000 And I write about that in the book.
00:10:45.000 And it's one of my favorite things to talk about how a budget is a moral document.
00:10:49.000 You are expressing.
00:10:50.000 To the world, what matters to you.
00:10:53.000 And if private jet deductions matter to you more than Head Start and Medicaid coverage, you're a bad hombre.
00:11:00.000 Okay, but the problem with this particular logic is that you will end up in a position of just saying the more you spend, the nicer you are, which is, of course, precisely what people on the left think.
00:11:10.000 And increasingly, people on the right think this too that you are cruel and heartless and all this.
00:11:14.000 If you don't just keep pledging people money, there's a solve for every problem.
00:11:17.000 The problem is always to be solved with the government.
00:11:21.000 This is why, presumably, the solve that was put forward by some on the Should I say Horseshoe Right or the NatCon Right?
00:11:28.000 The basic idea was that the government was going to solve childlessness by just throwing money at the problem.
00:11:32.000 That is not how you solve those sorts of problems.
00:11:35.000 Instead, what you end up with doing if you spend this much money, huge national debt, actual inflation, and beyond that, enormous amounts of waste, fraud, and abuse.
00:11:43.000 Fox News is reporting that taxpayer dollars intended to put roofs over the heads of LA's homeless allegedly paid instead for a $50,000 Tahiti vacation, a high end nightclub, and $140,000 for restoring a vintage luxury vehicle and other personal expenses.
00:11:57.000 Federal authorities said on Wednesday, as agents found out across the city in an early morning fraud crackdown.
00:12:03.000 At the center of that crackdown is a person named Michael Young, 46.
00:12:06.000 A founder of the Culver City based nonprofit Home at Last, he receives more than $118 million in public funds through government contracts, including more than $75 million from LA Homeless Services Authority.
00:12:17.000 And then he misappropriated millions of dollars.
00:12:19.000 Again, that is what happens when you turn the government into a giant grab bag of cash.
00:12:24.000 And now, Scott Besant was asked about inflation and how much of it is Trump and how much of it is Biden.
00:12:29.000 Here's Representative Richie Torres asking him.
00:12:32.000 Here's the exchange.
00:12:33.000 Mr. Secretary, how can you possibly declare? 0.51
00:12:36.000 That the K shaped economy is over when during President Trump's second term the assets of Wall Street are booming while the real wages of Main Street have barely grown? 0.75
00:12:46.000 Well, it's the opposite of President Biden's term because there was a. 0.99
00:12:50.000 No, no, let me finish.
00:12:52.000 Can I ask, what's the statute of limitations on the Joe Biden blame game?
00:12:56.000 What's the statute of limitations?
00:12:57.000 Because we're approaching the two year mark of the Trump administration.
00:13:00.000 I was in a car accident as a teenager, my backstory.
00:13:02.000 Did Joe Biden wage the war in Iran?
00:13:05.000 Did he disrupt the Strait of Hormuz?
00:13:06.000 Did he shut down one fifth of the world's oil supply and LNG exports?
00:13:11.000 Like when in doubt, blame Joe Biden?
00:13:12.000 Is that the modus operandi of this administration?
00:13:14.000 Well, Scott Besson is correct that you do have lasting effects of the price increases under Joe Biden.
00:13:20.000 Also, inflation is a little bit too high for sure.
00:13:22.000 Now, one of the things the Trump administration has said, I think absolutely correctly, is that the only way that you get yourself out of the predicament of massive national debt is by outproducing.
00:13:32.000 You have to have higher productivity.
00:13:34.000 What an amazing video you just watched.
00:13:36.000 Wasn't that amazing?
00:13:37.000 Well, you know, if you think so, head on over to dailywire.comslash subscribe to watch the full show ad free or check out this crazy story here.
00:13:44.000 Every significant movement in history has started with protesting. 0.99
00:13:47.000 You're a traitor! 0.99
00:13:48.000 It's Uncle Tom! 0.99
00:13:48.000 This is our generation's civil rights! 0.99
00:13:50.000 I have no idea what the protest is about.
00:13:52.000 Bingo!
00:13:53.000 Given the current climate, should a figure as polarizing as Clay Saunders even be allowed on campus?
00:13:58.000 Ah, can you hear me okay?
00:13:59.000 Saunders is a close personal friend of Chancellor Friedman.
00:14:02.000 This is a decision I cannot fight. 1.00
00:14:03.000 Islam will conquer the West. 1.00
00:14:06.000 Assalamualaikum. 1.00
00:14:10.000 Are we paying attention?
00:14:12.000 They've taken over the building.
00:14:13.000 They're downstairs and they've blocked the doors.
00:14:17.000 I seek forgiveness from Allah the Almighty.
00:14:21.000 We cannot run and hide.
00:14:23.000 Muhammad is the messenger of God.
00:14:26.000 There is no God but Allah.
00:14:29.000 What do you say? 1.00
00:14:30.000 We turn those SOBs into a fine red mist. 0.99
00:14:35.000 As we move, one man will cover while the other guys go. 1.00
00:14:38.000 They call that leapfrogging.
00:14:40.000 Stretch them while we listen.
00:14:43.000 You need a course in safe weapons handling.