Commentary
There is a scene in a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film in which the boss of a law firm leaves for vacation and puts his intellectually limited Cousin Egbert in charge. The note adds “don’t do anything.”
This is exactly the note that the Fed needs now. Just stop doing things.
Its record-breaking rate increases over the last year—not in height but speed and degree of increases—have massively disrupted bank balance sheets, shifted capital investment structures, and added huge costs to financing at a time of high inflation.
They were made necessary by the wild printing spree of the two previous years, which enabled the biggest expansion of government in our lifetimes and unleashed domestic dollar devaluation, thus pillaging the poor and middle classes….