Fed officials jawbone the markets and spread disinformation. They figure it’s part of their job as central planners. It’s not enough to pull the levers and twist the knobs on interest rates, the money supply, and asset prices. They also use propaganda to manage investor psychology. It’s all smoke and mirrors.

Frustrated precious metals investors wonder just how long officials will maintain their hold over markets when so much of what they say turns out to be garbage and so much of what they do ends in failure.

The answer is perhaps not much longer. There are real cracks emerging in the credibility of Fed banksters. It has taken years, but investors and pundits are finally questioning whether the Fed knows what it’s doing. They have progressed from the blind worship of Alan Greenspan, who engineered first the Dot.com bubble and then the housing bubble that made people feel so wealthy, to wondering if they can believe a word Janet Yellen says.

Following the most recent FOMC meeting, CNBC’s Steve Liesman, heretofore one of the Fed’s biggest apologists, asked Janet Yellen this difficult question; “Does the Fed have a credibility problem in the sense that it says it will do one thing under certain conditions, but doesn’t end up doing it?”

Yellen responded with typical “Fedspeak” and did nothing to shore up confidence:

Well, let me start — let me start with the question of the Fed’s credibility. And you used the word “promises” in connection with that. And as I tried to emphasize in my opening statement, the paths that the participants project for the Federal Funds rate and how it will evolve are not a pre-set plan or commitment or promise of the committee.

Indeed, they are not even — the median should not be interpreted as a committee-endorsed forecast. And there’s a lot of uncertainty around each participant’s projection. And they will evolve. Those assessments of appropriate policy are completely contingent on each participant’s forecasts of the economy and how economic events will unfold. And they are, of course, uncertain. And you should fully expect that forecasts for the appropriate path of policy on the part of all participants will evolve over time as shocks, positive or negative, hit the economy that alter those forecasts.