At the end of the day, modern central banking is simply a cover story to enable expansion of government activities either by creating unnecessary crises and dislocations or owing to falsely cheap interest rates which enable vast increases in the public debt.

In the present chapter of post-Volcker monetary policy machinations the Fed is allegedly attempting to thread the needle to bring inflation back to the sacrosanct 2.00% "goal" while not sending the economy into the recessionary drink. But in that mission it will positively fail (again).

That's because it has neither the tools to control the inflation rate with any precision (or any other macro-target), nor even measure it with the accuracy implicit in its policy targets. In this respect, monetary-policy-in-one-country is no more valid than was socialism-in-one-country when Stalin advocated it upon Lenin's death in 1924. The predicate was just plain wrong, then and now.

In the current case, the Fed can do one tangible thing alone (aside from jaw-boning and open-mouth policy which can't be taken seriously in today's world). To wit, it can create or extinguish fiat dollar credits via its open market operations, but it has virtually zero control over the subsequent destiny and impact of these credits as they wind their way through the canyons of Wall Street initially, and eventually through the real economy and its global linkages to merchandise trade, international labor cost arbitrage and money and capital markets flows over the length and breadth of the world economy.

For instance, it has no control whatsoever over the Brent global marker price for crude oil, which has again pushed over $90 per barrel, bringing the related domestic WTI price up from a recent low of $65 per barrel (May 2023) to nearly $85. Moreover, crude oil supply is fixing to remain materially shrunken by upwards of 1.7 million barrels per day owing to the recently announced extension of production cuts by Russia, Saudi Arabia and lesser OPEC members.