Is the Fed trying to wean the markets off monetary policy? Such was an interesting premise from Alastair Crooke via the Strategic Culture Foundation. To wit:

“The Fed however, may be attempting to implement a contrarian, controlled demolition of the U.S. bubble-economy through interest rate increases. The rate rises will not slay the inflation ‘dragon’ (they would need to be much higher to do that). The purpose is to break a generalised ‘dependency habit’ on free money.”

That is a powerful assessment. If true, there is an overarching impact on the economic and financial markets over the next decade. Such is critical when considering the impact on financial market returns over the previous decade.

“The chart below shows the average annual inflation-adjusted total returns (dividends included) since 1928. I used the total return data from Aswath Damodaran, a Stern School of Business professor at New York University. The chart shows that from 1928 to 2021, the market returned 8.48% after inflation. However, notice that after the financial crisis in 2008, returns jumped by an average of four percentage points for the various periods.“

We can trace those outsized returns back to the Fed’s and the Government’s fiscal policy interventions during that period. Following the financial crisis, the Federal Reserve intervened when the market stumbled or threatened the “wealth effect.”

Many suggest the Federal Reserve’s monetary interventions do not affect financial markets. However, the correlation between the two is extremely high.

The result of more than a decade of unbridled monetary experiments led to a massive wealth gap in the U.S. Such has become front and center of the political landscape.

It isn’t just the massive expansion in household net worth since the Financial Crisis that is troublesome. The problem is nearly 70% of that household net worth became concentrated in the top 10% of income earners.

…click on the above link to read the rest…