I know its not fair to pick on an old guy who should have been put out to pasture long ago. But the chief economist for Dow Jones/MarketWatch, Irving Kellner, posted something this morning so truly stupid that he deserves a smackdown——especially after 40 years on Wall Street as top economist at Chase, Chemical and Manufacturers Hanover etc.

Making the case for yet another Fed rate delay, Kellner offered up this gem right out of the gate:

Every day brings another reason why the Federal Reserve should hold off before raising interest rates………First and foremost there was the recent plunge in stock prices.

Huh? Apparently dips are now “plunges” and no longer permitted.

I was actually thinking this was the obligatory hat tip to the casino, and that some better reasons for delay would soon follow. Alas, they got worse!

It wasn’t that Kellner has espied a hair-curling recession lurking around the corner, which might have been flagged by the stock market’s recent 10% “correction”.

No, it was just that the market stumbled for fear that the Fed might stop the juice, and that was reason enough to keep the free money flowing into the 81st month:

There were a number of reasons advanced for its plunge, but when you peel them away one reason stands out: the stock market did not like the idea that the days of easy money, which kept equities afloat, were about to come to an end.

There you have it. The case for ease is that Wall Street prefers ease.

Stated differently, the Fed and other central banks have generated such an humungous and incendiary bubble that they dare not risk puncturing it——even if it means indefinitely perpetuating the absolute lunacy of ZIRP.

In fact, in his apparent dotage, Kellner argued exactly that. The Fed has to keep rates pinned to the zero bound because all the other central banks are doing the same thing.

Another reason for the Fed to stand pat on rates is that most other central banks are easing. A tighter Fed at a time of global ease would only exacerbate its effects both domestically as well as internationally.

Well, indeed it would, but that’s exactly the trouble. We have been in a time of “global ease” for the past 20 years running. Owing to the madcap money printing spree of the world’s convoy of central banks, the very notion of financial discipline and honest price discovery in the money and capital markets has been expurgated from the system.