By MN Gordon
If you go by a partial subset of the ‘official’ government statistics, perhaps, it appears she does. The unemployment rate is at 4.5 percent, which is considered full employment. What’s more, inflation is ‘reasonably close’ to the Fed’s 2-percent inflation target. But what does this mean, really?
According to Fed Chair Yellen, it means that now’s the time to tighten up the nation’s monetary policy.
Behind the Curve
Economic nonsense comes a dime a dozen. For example, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen “think(s) we have a healthy economy now.” She even told the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy so earlier this week. Does she know what she’s talking about?
Somehow, this cartoon never gets old…
If you go by a partial subset of the ‘official’ government statistics, perhaps, it appears she does. The unemployment rate is at 4.5 percent, which is considered full employment. What’s more, inflation is ‘reasonably close’ to the Fed’s 2-percent inflation target. But what does this mean, really?
According to Fed Chair Yellen, it means that now’s the time to tighten up the nation’s monetary policy.
Behold this display of awesomeness, citizen. Doesn’t it prove that central planning “works” after all? Unfortunately the ointment is never entirely fly-free, especially when one is pondering statistical aggregates – click to enlarge.
By now you’ve likely seen this upcoming – choice – quote from Yellen. Nonetheless, we can’t resist repeating its remarkable idiocy. For Yellen, who was in the greater Detroit metropolitan area, was kind enough to humor us all with a nifty automotive analogy to explain how to go about normalizing monetary policy. Here Yellen elaborates with a variety of technical terms:
“Whereas before we had our foot pressed down on the gas pedal trying to give the economy all the oomph we possibly could, now allowing the economy to kind of coast and remain on an even keel – to give it some gas but not so much that we are pressing down hard on the accelerator – that’s a better stance of monetary policy. We want to be ahead of the curve and not behind it.”
As far as we can tell, Yellen’s merely huffing and blowing gas. What curve she wants to stay ahead of is unclear. We assume she’s referring to the inflation curve, although this does seem a bit out of context.
By our account, inflation of the money supply is, indeed, inflation. Hence, the Fed fell behind the curve between September 2008 and December 2014 when it inflated its balance sheet from $905 billion to $4.5 trillion. By our back of the napkin calculation that tallies up to nearly a 400 percent inflation of the Fed’s balance sheet. But what do we know?
The broad true US money supply TMS-2 vs. assets held by the Federal Reserve since the GFC. A few points worth noting: TMS-2 expanded by ~140% between January 2008 and January 2017. One way of looking at this statistic is “in the entire history of the US, an amount X of money was created until early 2008. Since then, the amount of money in the economy has increased by 2.4 times”. The money supply had doubled by November 2014, so it took a little less than six years to print as much money in the US than in its entire preceding history. Yes, this is quite a bit of inflation. …read more
Source:: Acting Man
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