The chart below crystallizes why the Fed is stranded in a monetary no man’s land. By the time of next week’s meeting the federal funds rate will have been pinned at about 10 bps, or effectively zero, for 84 straight months.
Yet during that same period, the consumer price level has risen by 1.75% per year. And that’s if you give credit to all of the BLS gimmicks, such as hedonic adjustments for quality change, homeowners “imputed” rents and product basket substitution, which cause inflation to be systematically understated.
On a basis that is close enough for government work, therefore, the real money market interest rate has been negative 2% for seven years. But that’s so crazy, unjustified, and unprecedented that even the Keynesian money printers who run the Fed have run out of excuses.
Presumably, Yellen and her posse know that we did not have seven years running of negative money market rates even during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
So after one pretension, delusion, head fake and forecasting error after another, the denizens of the Eccles Building have painted themselves into the most dangerous monetary corner in history. They have left themselves no alternative except to provoke a riot in the casino——-the very outcome that has filled them with fear and dread all these years.
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