CNBC Host Becomes Distraught After Elizabeth Warren Talks Past His Argument Against Her Price Gouging Position

CNBC’s Joe Kernen became frustrated with Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren as she kept speaking over him during a debate about price gouging.

Harris recently announced her intention to impose a federal ban on so-called “price gouging” on groceries, with the planreceiving significant pushback. Kernen, on “Squawk Box,” told Warren during a debate on price gouging that “it’s frustrating” to speak with her because she doesn’t let him respond, making it impossible for her to “lose an argument.”

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“If you lose The Washington Post as a Democrat, you got some serious problems. This is what they said about the price gouging, or the price control legislation,” Kernen said. “It was really pilloried from both sides of the aisle … I can paint you a picture how that would work and how it’s worked in the past, where we’ve tried to artificially hold prices down. Competition doesn’t come in. Like if beef is too high, people don’t move the chicken. Competitors don’t come in to undercut where the beef prices are. Nothing works when you try to artificially control prices. It’s just the supply and demand issue. It’s a flawed idea.”

Warren asked Kernen if he had a question or if he was just making a statement. The CNBC host clarified his question was about why Warren would propose an idea like this.

“I understand if you want to do a lecture about this, but let’s just start with, where have you been for the last 30 years, as three dozen states have price gouging laws, and they have used them effectively? States like Texas and Florida. They’ve used price gouging laws. Price gouging laws are not price control,” Warren said. “Price gouging laws are to say, ‘you know, sometimes markets go off the rails, and when they do, we need some ways to get them back on the rails. We need some curbs on that behavior.’”

“So, for example, we watched in the pandemic how prices went up for a whole lot of reasons. They went up partly because we had supply chain kinks. We had problems because of the war in Ukraine that cut supplies of certain commodities. And one of the things that happened as a result of that is there were corporations that said, ‘whoa. Now that we have inflation, now that prices are up overall, this is a great opportunity for us to raise prices, not just in passing along costs, but to go way, way, way above that.’ And how do we know that it was way, way above just passing along costs? Look at what happened to their profit margins.”

Warren then said companies in concentrated industries, including the egg sector, raised their prices to boost profits rather than pass along costs. Kernen attempted to chime in to refute Warren, but she talked over him.

Kernen then brought up how Warren has alleged Kraft-Heinz “increased profits by 448% in 2022.”

“Kraft, you say, was 440% profit increase. The example you used, the prior quarter from the year before, they had a charge of 1.3 billion dollars, an accounting change, which wiped out profits,” he said.

Warren talked over the CNBC host again, and he asked her to let him complete his thoughts.

“You didn’t let me finish. Look at the data. Come on. We have economic study after economic study,” she said.

“This is the way you never lose an argument because no one can ever say anything back to you, Senator. It’s frustrating,” Kernen later said.

Warren also became frustrated with Kernen during the debate for talking over her.

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