Home Federal Reserve The Babble-On 7: The Fed and Yellen – Charles Hugh Smith (02/25/2021)

The Babble-On 7: The Fed and Yellen – Charles Hugh Smith (02/25/2021)

February 25, 2021

So babble on, Babble-On 7; it won’t change anything. The forces in motion are like tides, and you can’t talk the tide into reversing.

Allow me to introduce the Babble-On 7: the six board members of the Federal Reserve and Treasury chief Janet Yellen. (The Fed board has seven slots but one is vacant at the moment, so 6 + Yellen = 7.)

These seven lackeys of the Financial Aristocracy babble on, endlessly repeating the same disconnected-from-reality fantasies and delusions, apparently on the premise that if they repeat “you can fly, you can fly!” often enough, people will jump off the cliff actually believing the Fed and Treasury gave them super-powers to sprout wings at will.

Alas, denying reality does not stop reality from intruding, typically with great force. The Fed is not all-powerful, and wings will not sprout from believers’ shoulder blades. They will impact the rocks at the bottom of the cliff with the devastating force known as gravity.

The short list of endlessly spewed disconnected-from-reality fantasies and delusions by the Babble-On 7 are:

Fantasy/Delusion # 1. The Federal Reserve’s policies of free money for financiers and speculators did not cause or exacerbate the skyrocketing wealth-income inequality that is undermining America’s democracy, social order and economy.

If the Fed governors were Pinocchio, their noses would have now crossed the Grand Canyon. Please examine any chart of wealth-income inequality in the U.S. and note how it took off as former Fed chair Greenspan destroyed market discovery of the price of credit and risk, and the Fed chair servants of the Financial Aristocracy who followed (and who were each well-rewarded for their abject servitude) only accelerated and amplified the wealth-income inequality that has fatally undermined the nation.

The chart below reflects how each of the three Fed-inflated speculative bubbles enriched the Financial Aristocracy at the expense of the bottom 90%. The Fed’s most recent spew of free money for financiers and speculators enriched the billionaires by a cool $1 trillion.

Fantasy/Delusion # 2. This is not a bubble, it is merely plain old normal investor activity. At this point, the Babble-On 7’s noses are in the troposphere, threatening low-orbit satellites, as even the most cursory glance at the charts of equities such as Tesla or the Russell 2000 index (IWM) reveal GBOAT: The Greatest Bubble of All Time.

Fantasy/Delusion # 3. The next trillion will make it all better–and if $1 trillion isn’t enough, we’ll go big and create $5 trillion, $10 trillion, $20 trillion, whatever it takes, to prop up the sad, pathetic distortions that have brought America to the precipice.

Because the one thing Yellen and the Fed Six cannot allow is for those they serve so diligently to lose any of their bubblicious wealth. Since the bottom 90% own near-zero of the nation’s income-producing capital, the karmic collapse of the Fed’s latest and greatest bubble won’t have much of a direct effect on those who actually work for a living–but it will remove the immense hoard of phantom wealth the Fed has bestowed on the financiers and speculators that make up the Financial Aristocracy.

For the Fed, supposedly blessed with god-like powers, cannot eliminate diminishing returns on its delusional tricks. Lowering interest rates to zero–done. The sugar high from the Fed’s spew of trillions is diminishing faster than they can babble on.

The Babble-On 7 would do well to study the meaning of their moniker: Babylon:

Babylon has achieved considerable prominence throughout the ages as a symbol and by-word of wealth, luxury, decadence, vice and corruption. The city owes its fame (or infamy) to the many references the Bible makes to it; all of which are unfavorable.

So babble on, Babble-On 7; it won’t change anything. The forces in motion are like tides, and you can’t talk the tide into reversing.