"Exposing the Federal Reserve's Inflation Deception"
by Nick Giambruno
"The Federal Reserve is in the news as its rate hiking farce has come to its predictable end. With any discussion about the Fed and central banks, it is essential to keep the basics in mind. You have to start with the most fundamental concept here: central planning doesn’t work. That’s the first principle.
Central planning of shoes doesn’t work. Central planning of wheat doesn’t work, and central planning of (fake) money doesn’t work. Central banks in general - and the Fed in particular - are on a mission impossible. They don’t know what the interest rate should be. Nobody does. That’s an exclusive function of a voluntary market of savers and borrowers.
A politburo can’t centrally plan interest rates any more than they can potatoes. They’re inevitably going to fail and cause significant damage. It’s also important to remember central banks have NOTHING to do with the free market. They’re actually the antithesis of the free market. In Karl Marx’s "Communist Manifesto", central banking is the 5th plank. The lying media portrays central bankers as selfless bureaucrats who are just trying to save the economy. It’s a load of BS. Central bankers are the enemy of the average person.
Now, back to the rate hiking charade. The Fed had embarked on one of the steepest rate hike cycles in history in 2022. They did so because price increases were spiraling out of control after the Fed inflated the money supply by around 40% - a staggering amount - amid the Covid mass psychosis starting in 2020. In other words, they were forced to embark on this steep rate hike cycle to combat the inflation that they caused in the first place.
At the time, I knew they would never be able to tame inflation because of the skyrocketing federal debt load. If the Fed was able to raise interest rates to the point where it would actually defeat inflation, the rising interest expense on this exploding pile of debt would have bankrupted the US government. The federal debt’s interest cost is already higher than the defense budget. Soon, it could exceed Social Security and other entitlements and become the number one item in the federal budget.
For context, the last time inflation was raging, Fed Chair Paul Volcker needed to raise interest rates above 17%. However, that was in the early 1980s, when the US debt-to-GDP ratio was around 30%. Today, it’s north of 123% and rising rapidly.
Today’s higher debt load and accompanying interest expense are why the Volcker option is not on the table. There’s no way the Fed could raise rates any near 17%. They barely took rates above 5% this time before capitulating - not even 1/3 of what Volcker did.
In short…The federal interest expense exceeded $1 trillion for the first time recently. The federal interest expense has recently exceeded national defense spending for the first time and is poised to become the largest item in the budget. The US government is now borrowing money to pay the interest on the money it has already borrowed. Considering all of this, Fed Chair Powell’s recent announcement that the rate hike cycle is officially over shouldn’t have been a surprise. Now, we’re going back to monetary easing.
The Fed’s Propaganda Victory: The Fed and its apologists in the lying media are trying to gaslight you and tell you inflation has been defeated, which is absurd. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is the most politically manipulated statistic in all of government. That is saying something because a lot of government statistics are completely manipulated, but inflation, as measured by the CPI, is probably the most manipulated.
The CPI is a basket of prices trying to measure the average price changes for 340 million Americans. It’s an impossible task because every individual has a different price basket. Consider someone who lives in New York City compared to someone who lives in rural Montana. They have totally different price baskets. Using the CPI as a measure of price increases for 340 million people is even more preposterous than taking the average temperature across 50 states in the US as a meaningful statistic to determine what clothes you should wear today.
Further, the government gets to cherry-pick what items go in the CPI basket and their weightings. It’s like letting a student grade his own paper. In short, the CPI is a worthless statistic. It’s misleading government propaganda intended to conceal the government’s atrocious currency debasement.
So, according to their own rigged CPI metric, has the Fed accomplished its inflation goal. Nope. They didn’t even reach their totally arbitrary 2% CPI target before they declared a fake victory. By the way, targeting 2% inflation is a nonsensical concept. Inflation is poisonous at any level. Think of it like a bucket that continuously leaks 2% of the water it carries. That’s the kind of outcome the clowns at the Fed are trying to engineer for the economy - but they couldn’t even do that. In short, the Fed’s narrative that inflation has been defeated is so laughably ridiculous that the only explanation is deliberate deception.
Here’s a way to think of it. Imagine you used to weigh 180 pounds in 2019. In 2020, you gained 10 pounds and are now 190 lbs. In 2021, you gained 25 pounds and are now 215 lbs. You tell concerned friends and family not to worry about your weight gain because it’s just "transitory." In 2022, you go on a diet but still gain 20 pounds. You are now 235 lbs. In 2023, you continue on your diet and gain 10 pounds. You are now 245 lbs. In 2024, you have gained 5 pounds so far and are now 250 lbs. The rate at which you gain weight is down, but your weight has increased around 40%, from 180 lbs to 250 lbs. You now declare victory, end your diet, and go back to the lifestyle that caused the weight gain surge in the first place.
This is the same kind of "victory" the Fed is declaring with inflation and the money supply, which also grew around 40% over a similar period. In short, they are gaslighting people and spewing propaganda. So, why are they attempting to deceive people? Nobody knows for sure except them. But if I had to guess, they are desperately trying to conceal the massive economic destruction they have already caused and the coming destruction they will cause, which could be much worse than anything we’ve seen so far.
It could all go down soon… and it won’t be pretty. It will result in an enormous wealth transfer from savers to the parasitical class - politicians, central bankers, and those connected to them."
No comments:
Post a Comment