Imagine the following scene.
You are walking on a street, toward the crest of a hill. You can hear the crackling of flames, and you can see the orange glow in the sky as cinders spiral slowly down from above you. Upon reaching the crest, you can see an entire neighborhood engulfed in a conflagration.
And there I am with a hose, pointed right at the center of the flames.
You assume, incorrectly, that I am dousing the flames with a powerful stream of water. You soon discover that the liquid shooting out of my hose is, in fact, gasoline, and I am doing my best to point the hose where I think the gas will be most effective.
“What the hell are you doing?”
I reply without looking your way: “I’m warming up everyone.”
“Yeah, you sure as hell are! Good God, man, the entire neighborhood is on fire! Why are you spraying gas on it, you maniac!”
I continue sweeping the hose back and forth. “It’s my mandate to keep people warm.”
“But you’re destroying everything!”
“Not really. The oxygen is feeding the flames, and these structures appear to be highly flammable, but you’re really going to have to take up those issues with whoever built these homes. This hose is my tool, and I’ll continue to use the tool until everyone in this city is at least 75 degrees. Once that’s accomplished, I’ll put my tool away. Now let me do my job.”
And that, my friends, is that Fed at work. Specifically:
- They claim to have a certain God-given mandate;
- They make use of the one “tool” at their disposal, pledging to put it away once it has done its job;
- They accept absolutely no responsibility whatever for any knock-off effects that may occur in the course of fulfilling their mandate
- A staggering amount of collateral damage is foisted upon an innocent public in the process.
The economy, the capital markets, and wealth distribution have become more grotesquely-distorted, perverted, and warped than at any other time in human history. I have written about this endlessly and prefer to simply point you to this page where I’ve stacked up countless charts to make the point about the maldistribution of wealth.
But the fact that Jerome Powell can stand in front of a microphone and, with a straight face, absolutely deny any responsibility for any of these maladies means only one of two things:
- (a) He is positively stupid and idiotic, which means a positively stupid and idiotic man is the single most powerful individual on Earth with respect to the economy…………or…….
- (b) He knows precisely what he is doing, and who benefits, and he’s convinced YOU are so stupid (or impotent) that it doesn’t matter what you think.
I’m kinda thinking it’s “b”, folks.
