Rate Hikes, Recessions, and the Death of Spiritual Boomerism
I hate to gloat but, screw it. I’m gloating. With every FOMC meeting this year, Jerome Powell has become more and more hawkish, but the denial of this still dominates the headlines. He raised the Fed Funds Rate to 4.5% last week, a level unthinkable to nearly everyone, including me, this time last year.
I told you all over a year ago Powell and the Fed were going to war with Davos and the ECB over Climate Change and their push for war with Russia. No one believed me then, and rightfully so. The idea was daft given the Fed’s history, the US’s books and the reality of a “Biden” presidency seemingly hellbent on spending the US into oblivion.
Hell, I barely believed me.
What I did believe was the Fed would be more aggressive than the majority in even the alternative finance space did, what I like to think of as the Zerohedge Set, because I didn’t think Powell was just another garden-variety globalist like his predecessors, Janet Yellen and Ben Bernanke.
In this business, “personnel is policy” is more important than our opinions on the numbers or even the state of the game board. Powell isn’t cut from the same egghead, ivory tower cloth of academia like Yellen and Bernanke.
He’s a private equity guy with a real background in deal-making and assessing risk when his money or his client’s is on the line.
So, expecting him to run the Fed the way Yellen and Bernanke did is a simply a bad assumption.
Powell’s statement on Wednesday was no less hawkish at 4.5% than his statement at Jackson Hole in August before he raised rates by 75 basis points to 3.25% in September. And yet, in the days leading up to Wednesday’s announcement and even afterwards the talk was still all about how he can’t go much higher; this is the last hike before he stops.
In article after article that’s all we hear. Stop raising rates, it’s your fault you’re behind the curve, Powell. Stop trying to make up for it. This guy, Peter Tchir actually thinks a recession is avoidable? Maybe in nominal terms that’s possible. To the normie crowd goosing nominal GDP constantly to avoid ‘number go down’ at the expense of literally everything that makes private capital formation possible may seem like a good idea.
Then again, you may be a Boomer.
But in real terms, terms that matter like directing capital into sustainable investments rather than throwing money at any silly ‘shovel-ready’ project Obama’s minions can cook up in a strategy meeting to sell to the Muppets, the idea of avoiding a recession is ludicrous on the face of it.
If anything, in real terms for fourteen years we haven’t been in anything other than a drawn-out struggle session forcing us to admit under duress that yes, in fact, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus who lives in the Marriner-Eccles building and he can make two plus two equal five.
It’s all been a massive leveraged loan bubble built on trillions in the most egregious spending of future seed corn in the history of the planet. No wonder Climate Change and ‘sustainable growth’ are such an easy sell to the Millennials, they’ve never really known anything other than the debt casino.
To bitch now about Powell being behind the inflation curve is just churlish back seat driving.
As I pointed out time and again, Powell’s reappointment was the subject of intense political struggle on Capitol Hill. He was only reconfirmed 6 months after he should have been and was under direct fire before that.
The policy differences between “Biden” and Powell placed “Private Equity Jay” behind the curve not because he was too chickenshit to start sooner but because “Biden” needed an excuse to not re-nominate him as FOMC chair. Raising rates in anticipation of incoming inflation while wrangling over “Build Back Better” and its $6 trillion in spending would have given us Lael Brainard, MMT and UBI to eternity.
And the US dollar bears would have rejoiced in having been right all along while Davos grinned like
Article from LewRockwell
