UnNews:All eyes are on the F.E.D.
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| We have met the enemy, and he is us | ✪ | UnNews | ✪ | Friday, April 19, 2024, 09:41:59 (UTC) |
| All eyes are on the F.E.D. | 
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15 March 2015
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Eyes around the world are looking here before next week's meeting of the Federal Reserve to decide if the agency is patient, angry, or perhaps a bit horny.
The Federal Reserve has a "dual mandate" from Congress to both defend the dollar and to contrive "full employment," especially just before elections, by attacking the dollar. It does so by buying and selling bonds on credit. The value of the dollar has recently been sent to Hell, but the economy has been sent to Hell exactly as fast, so there has been no need to recall all the dollars and issue new ones with three fewer zeros.
The Tea Party movement, which refers to the agency as the "F.E.D." because it is obviously initials for something that The Powers That Be don't want you to know, is asking whether the F.E.D. feels hawkish or dovish. A communiqué Wednesday will be full of hints for them to guess at. It will suggest that the F.E.D. can do a little more harm but stop doing it just before it becomes harmful, and that eternal natural laws have gone limp for the foreseeable future, though the F.E.D. has no idea why the price of gas dropped by half, and never predicted it.
Meanwhile, the central banks of Europe and Japan have embraced the technique Milton Friedman called "dropping money out of helicopters" — just as the F.E.D. gets set to abandon it. This Keynesian festival drowns everyone in money so they will all feel rich and buy summer homes, the monetary version of removing an hour from the morning and adding it to the evening so that everybody turns off the lights, drives to the baseball stadium, and sits all evening watching nothing happen.
In this global rope-a-dope, the dollar, just as everyone was ready to abandon it and buy oil with renminbi, will suddenly be the only money worth anything. If carried to extremes, American banks might finally start giving customers back a little more than they deposited, as European ones get set to return a little less, something casinos do better. And as the American people — no thanks to the Republican Party — are getting sick of giving tax money to layabouts, Europe has doubled down on giving tax money to layabout nations. This, like fracking, occurred despite President Obama's best efforts, but it will provide amusement during this year between elections when he takes full credit for it.
Mr. Friedman called for the F.E.D. to be replaced by a machine, so policy would be predictable. He used to say, "HAL 9000 killed astronauts, but it never took a bribe." Sen. Rand Paul wants the F.E.D. to be audited. This would put it under the control of Congress, which invented the dual mandate, cannot agree on anything now, and if it could, would be more corrupt than the F.E.D. is on its own. But TV economist Larry Kudlow still wants the entire U.S. Government to be replaced by a monarchy, headed by a benevolent King Dollar.
Sources[edit]
- Mike Peacock "Has the Fed's 'patience' been exhausted?". Reuters, March 15, 2015
- Larry Kudlow (op-ed) "King Dollar Naysayer Nonsense". TownHall, March 15, 2015