The Federal Reserve: Illusion of Understanding, Illusion of Control
The net result is nonsensical policies that fail to achieve their stated objectives.
We live in an era of illusion: the illusion of understanding, and the illusion of control.
Few institutions reflect these illusions better than the Federal Reserve, though the Pentagon, Congress, the Imperial Presidency, the sick-care cartel and the higher education cartel are certainly giving it a run for its money.
The foundation of the illusion of understanding is data–Big Data. That the Fed has no idea of how the real economy actually functions is painfully apparent. But the state’s vast flood of data, neatly organized into slop-troughs that suggest precision, creates a very compelling illusion of understanding: media shills go to absurd lengths to treat bogus or marginal data as the equivalent of the tablets brought down by Moses.
Sorry, Corporate Media: the unemployment rate and the official rate of inflation are not real. They are illusions rigged to lull the masses and enrapture the simulacrum experts living high on the hog in academia, NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and think-tanks.
Here is the reality, as expressed by IMF Chairwoman Christine Lagarde: what passes for precise data is a guesstimate at best, and a carefully executed distortion at worst.
The net result is nonsensical policies that fail to achieve their stated objectives. Even more tragicomic, the spokespeople tasked with presenting this failure to the Great Unwashed are forced to speak gobbledigook that borders on the psychotic if taken at face value.
For example, Janus Yellen must claim she is planning to raise interest rates while also proclaiming that she’s keeping rates at zero for the indefinite future. If a non-Elite person rambled on in this fashion, they would be tossed in jail as a 51-50 (involuntary psychiatric hold).
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