You’re All Fired, Part 2

It seems damn obvious that neither Jay Powell, Donald Trump, the 12 geniuses on the FOMC or any other set of Washington apparatchiks should be setting interest rates. That’s a job tailor-made for millions of players on the free market without any help, nudges, guidance or big fat thumb on the supply/demand scale by the central bank.

It also seems equally obvious that under the current post-1987 regime of Keynesian activism at the Fed that interest rates have been way too low for most of the past four decades. Indeed, the very idea that interest rates on the money market should be negative or even close to zero in real terms is an out-and-out recipe for inflation—-both with respect to goods and services prices on main street and also, most especially, with respect to financial asset prices on Wall Street.