How Dumb Is The Fed?

The question was prompted by this comment by former Fed insider Chris Whalen at The Institutional Risk Analyst blog:

[O]ur message to the folks in Jackson Hole this week [at the annual central banker meeting there] is that the end of the Fed’s reckless experiment in social engineering via QE and near-zero interest rates will end in tears.

“Momentum” stocks like Tesla, to paraphrase our friend Dani Hughes on CNBC last week, will adjust and the mother of all rotations into bonds and defensive stocks will ensue. We must wonder aloud if Chair Yellen and her colleagues on the FOMC fully understand what they have done to the US equity markets. […]

Once the hopeful souls who’ve driven bellwethers such as Tesla and Amazon into the stratosphere realize that the debt driven game of stock repurchases really is over, then we’ll see a panic rotation back into fixed income and defensive stocks.

Bent and Distorted

If you believe the newspapers, the Fed has begun a “tightening cycle.” It is on course to raise its key interest rate, little by little, in quarter-point increments.

It must know that this is a perilous thing to do. After so much market manipulation over such a long period, prices all up and down the capital structure – from junk bonds to quality stocks and solid real estate – have been bent and distorted.

After all, that was the idea: drive up the price of stocks and bonds by driving down interest rates. People would be forced to spend or invest their money rather than save it. And higher financial asset prices would make the rich feel even richer.

Walking down the street, the dollars would overflow from their pockets like turnips rolling off the back of a produce truck.

They’d feel so flush, they’d buy, buy, buy… sending the plain people into a flurry of trucking, toting, and busting their humps to provide them with goods and services.

Then, after the rich were fully satiated (after all, how many martinis can the 1% drink?), they’d have to invest.