What the Fed really decided Thursday was to ride the zero-bound right smack into the next recession. When that calamity happens not too many months from now, the 28-year experiment in monetary central planning inaugurated by a desperate Alan Greenspan after Black Monday in October 1987 will come to an abrupt and merciful halt.

Why? Because Keynesian money printing is in a doom loop. The Fed’s ZIRP policies guarantee another financial crash, which will trigger still another outbreak of panic in the C-suites of corporate America and a consequent liquidation of excess inventories and labor on main street. That’s the new channel of monetary policy transmission, and it eventually leads to recession.

This upcoming recession, in turn, will prove beyond a shadow of doubt that in today’s financialized global economy you can’t manage the GDP of a single country as if it were isolated in an economic bathtub surrounded by high walls; nor can you attain domestic macro-targets for employment and inflation through the blunderbuss instruments of pegged money market rates and wealth effects levitation of the stock market.

Instead, the Fed’s falsification of financial asset prices simply subsidizes gambling in secondary markets; enables daisy chains of collateral to be endlessly hypothecated and re-hypothecated; causes vast misallocations and malinvestments of corporate resources, especially stock buybacks and other financial engineering; and sends money managers scrambling for yield without regard to risk, such as in junk bonds and EM debt.

What it doesn’t do is get households all jiggy, causing them to boost their leverage and spend up a storm. That’s because they reached “peak debt” at the time of the financial crisis, and have been struggling to reduce debt ever since. In the most recent quarter, in fact, household debt posted at $13.6 trillion or 3% lower than in early 2008.

Stated differently, the household credit channel of monetary policy transmission was a one-time Keynesian parlor trick that is now over and done. All of the Fed’s vast emissions of central bank credit have pooled up in the canyons of Wall Street, and have not triggered a borrow and spend binge on main street.

Yellen’s post-meeting statement more or less conceded the point that the US economic bathtub is vulnerable to ill winds from abroad and that six years of “extraordinary” money printing and ZIRP have not succeeded in filling it to the brim. After reviewing a domestic economy that is purportedly in the pink of health (“Since the Committee met in July, the pace of job gains has been solid, the unemployment rate has declined, and overall labor market conditions have continued to improve.”), she was quick to introduce the skunk in the woodpile: 

The recovery from the Great Recession has advanced sufficiently far, and domestic spending appears sufficiently robust, that an argument can be made for a rise in interest rates at this time. We discussed this possibility at our meeting. However, in light of the heightened uncertainties abroad and a slightly softer expected path for inflation, the Committee judged it appropriate to wait for more evidence, including some further improvement in the labor market, to bolster its confidence that inflation will rise to 2 percent in the medium term.

That’s right. They are waiting for moar inflation in the face of a gale force deflation blowing in from China and its food chain of EM materials and components suppliers. Yet as we pointed out in conjunction with the tiny 0.2% year over year change in the August CPI, waiting for the overall index to hit 2.0% is a fool’s mission because the latter is currently a meaningless average of hot and cold.