Recently on our Twitter feed, @michaellebowitz, we introduced the hashtag #fedgibberish. The purpose was to tag Federal Reserve members’ comments that highlight desperate efforts to rationalize their inane monetary policy in the post-financial crisis era. This past week there were two quotes by Fed members and one by the head of the European Central Bank (ECB) which were highly deserving of the tag. We present them below, with commentary, to help you understand the predicament the Fed and other central banks face.

Lael Brainard

On September 5, 2017 Fed Governor Lael Brainard stated the following in a speech at the Economic Club of New York:

“We should be cautious about tightening policy further until we are confident inflation is on track to achieve our target.” – “There is a high premium on guiding inflation back up to target so as to retain space to buffer adverse shocks with conventional policy.”

Let us rephrase: The Fed must be careful not to raise interest rates further until signs of inflation appear. When said inflation does pick up and it meets our target, we can then raise interest rates further. In doing so, we will then have the ability to lower interest rates when the economy hits a rough spot.

Inflation has been benign since the 2008 financial crisis. Clearly, nine years of the lowest interest rates on record have not been inflationary for the prices of goods and services that make up most standard economic inflation gauges. In fact, it is difficult to find a better real world example of deflation than the incoherence of negative interest rates manufactured by some central bankers who are begging for inflation. That said, there is a strong positive correlation between the amount of Fed stimulus and the price of financial assets. What Lael Brainard and her colleagues fail to understand is that excessive Fed policy has diverted capital away from productive investments that would generate the inflation and economic growth she and her colleagues so desperately seek to conjure. The bottom line is they do not understand the effect that eight years of excessive stimulus have had on the economy and are clearly unaware of what must be done to solve the global economic malaise.