Occam's Razor

Should you care about the Federal Reserve? Sometimes called the Federal Reserve Bank (it’s not a real bank), but generally just “The Fed”, the Fed basically controls our money supply. It does this with virtually no oversight by those who ultimately hold the bag when it makes mistakes: us taxpayers.

I am most alarmed by what the Federal Reserve has been up to lately. It looks both completely sane and completely crazy. To start, the Fed cut interest rates banks can charge to borrow from each other, or the Fed itself, to zero. This happened in 2008 too and it’s their way of stimulating the economy. I noted in an earlier post that this seemed to be the last trick in their toolbox. Since both consumers and companies were already in hoc to the maximum, this wasn’t a viable way to stimulate growth anymore. But it was what they knew how to do, so they did it.

But the Fed has invented some new tricks they haven’t done before. The Fed has basically decided to bail out any business, at least those that are publicly traded. In the last recession, a lot of large businesses were too big to fail. Now it looks like most businesses in the United States that are publicly traded are too big to fail, in the eyes of the Fed.

Most of these businesses got in trouble because of the cheap money the Fed has promulgated since the previous recession. With no rules, businesses borrowed instead of investing and saving. Mostly they used borrowed money to buy back their own stock. When the stock price invariably went up due to supply and demand, its executives (whose pay is largely based on stock prices, which they get at a discount) sell them and profit. In short, the Fed’s policies of making money so cheap in many ways made this new depression so much worse.

During the Great Recession the Fed also bought a lot of corporate stock too, to show faith in the market. It helped stabilize things and turned the market around, although it took a very long time. Now the Fed is buying corporate debt in unlimited quantities. Basically a business tells the Fed gets to say how much their debt is worth as a share of their company, and the Fed will buy it, no questions asked. Essentially the Fed is paying inflated prices for very shaky corporate debt that no one else wants to buy.

In exchange, companies get some ready cash to help them tie things over. Maybe the Fed will recoup its investment and eventually even make a profit for us taxpayers. But this money was created and doled out with essentially no oversight. The Fed is not accountable to anyone. While there are certain things the Fed cannot do, anything not specifically prohibited is in theory legal.

If I were to load up my family’s portfolio with junk bonds, my spouse would likely divorce me. But when the Fed does the same, there’s no spouse to object, and no oversight to worry. You have to hope the Fed knows what it’s doing, and Donald Trump appointed many of them. God help us.

I don’t have much trust in the Fed. These tactics strike me as desperate. Moreover, they are letting the rich reap a huge windfall. Many of them were like me: smart enough to sell at peak market when we knew it wouldn’t last due to COVID-19. They bought more stock at low market, toward the middle of March. And now with the stock market reaching their pre-crash highs again — due to the Fed buying so much stock that supply and demand is inflating their prices artificially again, despite the ruined economy — they are cashing in again. It appears that the Fed is exacerbating income inequality in the name of keeping the economy from collapsing even more. The Fed is becoming a wealth distribution mechanism that seems to favor the rich.

A rational government should not tolerate this. The Fed is basically trying to keep American capitalism, as we have known it, going. It’s just that it looks like American capitalism is in its death throes. A model of capitalism that is inured from the consequences its actions like the environment costs it inflicts on the rest of us deserves to die. If it is to be replaced at all, it should be with a version of capitalism that works in the interests of the people, not against it.

In short, the Fed’s actions strike me overall as desperate and very chancy. It needs oversight and reigning in. Consumer advocates, and not Wall Street insiders should oversee it. It needs to be accountable.