The Federal Reserve, explained simply.

Please enjoy the Brian Belski Bottom.

OK, since a few people still don’t get it, let me summarize the situation for you:

The Fed is Full of Shit. It’s all propaganda.

There you go.

You can switch now from that econ degree to petroleum or nuclear engineering. You do not need to study this Fed any further.

Think of the millions of man and woman hours that have been spent this century talking about what some Fed apparatchik goofball said, or didn’t say, or might say, or might do. Someday, they promise. Completely useless, and increasingly absurd.

Whether you’re talking Inflation, Quantitative Tightening, helping poor minorities - whatever - the Fed lies. (These are all good links, fyi, but I’m biased.)

In summary, if you’re over 12 years old and you still can’t see that the Fed is full of shit, I cannot help you, and you should run - not walk - from here, and never read my stuff again.

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Hmmm, they’re thinking of eliminating Sven, and he’s even been on CNBC (pleasantly interviewed by Carl, who blocked me after many years.)

In all seriousness, I think Twitter’s brain-dead woke little Pol Pot wannabes are burning the site down in anticipation of big mean Elon coming in and cleaning house (and Twitter clearly is the Augean stables of corporations.)

Glad to be near the top of Twitter’s enemies list!

And, again, thanks to everyone on Twitter and elsewhere who has been so nice in defending me. I appreciate it.

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I was listening to Jack Farley and Michael Kao the other day - Jack does a good job and gets great guests, even when I disagree with them*, which isn’t too often (which should concern them) - anyway, Microstrategy was brought up, which reminded me of this thread: This One Popped The Bubble.

As I like to say: This is not Schadenfreude. It's Déjà vu.

• So Kao said at one point something along the lines of “we had no inflation” pre-2021. Very common thing to hear. Also very annoying. OK, we may not have had high b.s. CPI model numbers before 2021, but we sure as hell had a spiking cost of living (e.g. housing, tuition, medical care, etc.). Ask around (and there is no “2% inflation” mandate.)

• Also, Farley said that QE doesn’t cause inflation. Again, maybe not CPI “inflation,” but QE had a massive effect on housing.

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Yanis Varoufakis, on Larry Summers, and insiders (think ‘Davos Crowd’)…

Summers looked at me intensely and asked a question so well rehearsed that I suspected he had used it to test others before me.

‘There are two kinds of politicians,’ he said: ‘insiders and outsiders. The outsiders prioritize their freedom to speak their version of the truth. The price of their freedom is that they are ignored by the insiders, who make the important decisions. The insiders, for their part, follow a sacrosanct rule: never turn against other insiders and never talk to outsiders about what insiders say or do.

Their reward? Access to inside information and a chance, though no guarantee, of influencing powerful people and outcomes.’ With that Summers arrived at his question. ‘So, Yanis,’ he said, ‘which of the two are you?’

This passage from Sebastian Haffner’s Defying Hitler reminded me of many American armchair chickenhawk warmongers, like Bill Kristol, Max Boot and David Frum, who experience “war as a great game and were untouched by its realities.”

This is in turn reminded me of Nassim Taleb’s 2018 comments:

Removing the tail risk - preventing people from coming back if they inflict a lot of risk on others, like for example warriors...we are where we are today because warriors are in battle, you see? So if you're a complete uncontrollable warmonger like many people in Washington today, or journalists, or many think tank people, you'd end up dying in battle. These people don't die in battle.

Gene Callahan:

Taleb extends this trope to foreign policy. He goes after “interventionistas” who have repeatedly urged us to intervene in foreign countries—Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria—whose governments did not meet abstract standards of political acceptability. Each of those interventions made conditions significantly worse in the country being “saved.” Yet the interventionistas pay no price for wrecking the lives of millions. Instead they keep appearing on CNN and PBS as “experts” who should guide us in choosing what country to bomb next.

Boy, does this sound familiar…

For political as well as technical reasons, the Empire did not sufficiently cover its war expenditures through taxation. Instead, it increased the supply of money from 12.5 to 63.5 billion marks between 1914 and 1918.