Tag Archives: Jerome Powell

Back in January I wrote a piece called, “Who’s Afraid of Jerome Powell?” Then I discussed the incipient wailing and gnashing of teeth coming from those terrified of a hawkish Fed. Our entire society has become so addicted to cheap dollars and easy credit that it created a “Ballers” mentality society wide.

Ballers is all about the corruption money brings to those few thousand people in the NFL and their organizations because of the millions of people who spend too much money on a passing fancy, entertainment.

The NFL, like all pro sports, is nothing but a money funnel with a Federal Reserve sized Hoover attached to it. It’s the ultimate corruption of e pluribus unum. From many to one.

Take a little bit from all of us, time and again to help us relieve the stress of the shitty world they’ve built. Give some of it to the rubes who play the game, who blow it on hookers, high end cars, and drugs, while the lion’s share gets sucked right back up into the same oligarch class that created it in the first place.

But it’s no different than you or me, buying shit we don’t need on credit, self-medicating with pro sports, alcohol, video games, day-trading cryptos on Robinhood, yelling at racists on Twitter or my personal favorite, a ridiculous board game collection.

We’re all ballers to one degree or another, spending easy money on distractions rather than facing the reality that the most unsustainable thing about our society is the money which makes it all happen.

Here we are eight months later and Powell has done exactly what I’d hoped he’d do, aggressively raise rates and begin shrinking the Fed’s balance sheet once his second term as FOMC chair was confirmed.

“There is no spoon” — The Matrix
“Ray, when someone asks you if you’re a god, you say YES!” — Ghostbusters

After the July FOMC meeting the headlines were abuzz with this crazy notion that the Fed ‘pivoted’ off of tight monetary policy.

They say these things because this is what they want. It’s the world they want, not the world they’ve got.

For nearly three weeks credit spreads, equity, bond and currency markets tried to convince us that the Fed had indeed done something it hadn’t done.

The commentary from the financial Twitterati and the headlines from the regime-controlled media tried desperately to spin a 75 basis point hike into a dovish event.

Financial commentary and its incessant chasing the news cycle and Overton window manipulation leads people down blind allies. It leads them to forget the first rule of watching a central bank:

Respond only to what they do, not what they say.

The fact is the Fed raised rates for a second time by more than most people thought they would raise total in this cycle.

Jerome Powell didn’t say anything anyone could have possibly, under different circumstances, construed as ‘dovish’ during July’s presser. But that didn’t stop the ‘experts’ from taking the ECB’s side and talking their own hedge books.

Eurodollar futures tried to blackmail the market into this false reality. Now it’s having to walk this back as the yield curve inversion has moved back to March from December. But, I want you to note the insanity of the Dec/Mar spread.