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IPFS News Link • Federal Reserve

"Stupid And Ridiculous": Rabobank Says The Fed Will Cause Everything To Come Crashing...

• https://www.zerohedge.com, by Michael Every

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"Central banks carry out a nation's monetary policy and control its money supply, often mandated with maintaining low inflation and steady GDP growth. On a macro basis, central banks influence interest rates and participate in open market operations to control the cost of borrowing and lending throughout an economy." Investopedia

Really? That's how it works, is it? At this point anyone who can't see our real economic/financial market paradigm is either foolish, ignorant, or wilfully blind. The Fed has just admitted wages can't rise except by making very rich people very much richer for a long, long time; then, finally, they might start to go up - perhaps. Moreover, the Fed has demonstrated yet again that it not only ignores asset bubbles --it will "never hold back support for the economy even if asset prices are too high"-- but that it wants those bubbles. How can this end well?

Look at the uneven distribution of stock holdings. Gallup states that as of 4 June 2020, 55% of the US owns some stock: 66% of those aged 50-64 and 32% of those 18-29; 58% of men and 52% of women; 64% of whites, 42% of blacks, and 28% of Hispanics; 85% of post-graduates and 33% of those with no college education. It is far from genuine equality of ownership by any means. But what Gallup does not say, and Goldman Sachs does, is that as of February this year 50% of the US stock market was owned by the top 1% of society.

Could we please have the intellectual honesty just to admit the system as it exists today functions to give more money to ultra-rich people? This is no longer a 'free market system'. Water does not find its own level. It is channelled through canals cut by an establishment, and some fields are watered very well and others left arid. This is not 'capitalism' as anyone teaches or models it, where money is made from productively investing in making things. It is speculative financial-capitalism, where money is made by watching money being made by central banks, which is then channelled into the stock of firms who often don't make things. Given the homilies that central banks are now coming out with about inequality, one could even say it is even oligarchy excreting noblesse oblige. Yet perhaps it is even worse: central banks saying "Let them eat stocks."

For those who roll out the cliché: "Well, the central-bank toolkit only allows X, Y, or Z – what can they do?" consider that these toolkits seem to expand on a weekly basis – but never in a direction that means wages will go up ahead of assets. Never. All the feverish innovation goes into new channels to get house prices up, or stocks, or sovereign or junk bonds (some of which are the same thing).


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