The Most Dangerous Game
How can I not talk about the Fed? How can I not talk about the daily jawboning? It is all around us. Every. Single. Day.
And it keeps working.
I feel like I’m being reduced to a loon conspiracy theorist documenting the very reality of it. But I’m not. From my perch I’m doing a public service doing it, because the background motivation for why it is being done reveals a deeper and disturbing truth: They are scared, they are worried and they are desperate to keep the balls in the air.
In my view it’s disingenuous to not acknowledge the real impact central banks have on markets and assess the risk implications.
Yesterday the Fed went full circus. It was stunning to watch and I suspect they made a couple of mistakes by revealing things they shouldn’t have.
Not a surprise Bullard wants to see cuts, but it was Clarida and Williams who dropped the bombs. Wait for bad data? Nah, just cut preemptively. A full abandonment of the ‘data dependency’ charade. To ‘influence markets’. Stated straight up for all to see. They are no longer even pretending.
And a stunning admission from Williams: “When you only have so much stimulus at your disposal, it pays to act quickly to lower rates at the first sign of economic distress.”
It pays to act when you have limited ammunition. A clear acknowledgement of what I’ve been outlining: The Fed, by not being being able to normalize in this cycle, is scrapping at the bottom.
So they want to intervene before things turn bad and hope this will prevent a recession. How? By blowing the asset bubble even higher.
And it worked again yesterday. Stocks flew higher, especially in after hours.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
