The Fed’s god-like powers will be revealed for what they really are: artifice and illusion.
We’re getting a real-world economics lesson in rip-your-face-off increases in prices, and the tuition is about to go up–way up.
People caught on that the returns on the frenzied hamster wheel of “normal” have been diminishing for decades, but everyone was too busy to notice.
The higher they push phantom “assets” based on exponential increases in leverage, the greater the air gap between essential tangibles and fantasy.
For about 1 in 4, Social Security provides at least 90 percent of their income.
What does it say about our “prosperity” if we can’t even afford to equal the purchasing power of the minimum wage paid 50 years ago? It says the 1% got the mine and the bottom 90% got the shaft.
That the era of stability has ended and a new era of increasingly chaotic volatility has begun is not on anyone’s radar as a possibility.
Change the incentives, and the outcomes change.
The Fed sees itself as trapped by the incompetence and greed of the other players and by its own policy extremes that were little more than expedient “saves” of a system that is unraveling due to its fragility and brittleness.
We can also posit a general rule that those who inherit wealth and succumb to FOMO are eventually less wealthy while those who are wealthy and take a pass on FOMO / hoarding at the top of the manic frenzy increase their wealth.