‘We Need More Courage’ in D.C.: Jack Bogle
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Washington lawmakers need to show courage in dealing with long-term fiscal issues, The Vanguard Group Senior Chairman Jack Bogle said Monday on CNBC's "Fast Money."
"I am profoundly worried about that," he said. "The reality is that we always have something to worry about."
Bogle said that economic growth was crucial.
"We've got to grow our economy out of this mess, and if we can grow the economy enough, it will take care of the deficits," he added. "I do think we have to do much more on the very long term."
Calling it a "third rail," Bogle also said that policies on Social Security and Medicare were among "the most disturbing part of what we're doing."
"We need a little more courage down in Washington," he said. "It's not easy to find courage down there."
Bogle said that he wasn't focused on the market on a day-to-day basis, taking a broader perspective.
"We went down awfully fast, and it's taken us four years to recover – just about four years to recover – and that's probably kind of normal in the history of the big fluctuations in the marketplace," he said. "I mean, the idea is don't worry about what stocks are doing today, tonight or tomorrow. I look out a decade, and it requires some guts to do this, some character, some courage."
Bogle did have critical words for the Federal Reserve's monetary policy.
"Continuing to have easy money, extremely low interest rates kind of has the worst behavior in our speculators in all these collateralized mortgage obligations," he said. "They're very difficult to do at high interest rates, but low interest rates – call it low carrying costs – it makes the speculators' job easy. And that's the last thing we really want to do because in our markets we have far too much short-term speculation and not enough long-term investment."
