Federal Reserve Confesses Sole Responsibility For All Recessions
In a surprisingly candid admission, two former Federal Reserve chairs have stated that the Federal Reserve alone is responsible for creating all recessions in the United States.
First, former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke said that
Expansions don’t die of old age. They get murdered.
- MarketWatch
To clarify this statement, former Chair Janet Yellen placed the murder weapon in the Fed’s hands:
Two things usually end them… One is financial imbalances, and the other is the Fed.
Think that through, and you quickly realize that both of those things are the Fed. Is there anyone left standing who would not say the Fed’s quantitative easing in the past decade was the biggest cause of financial imbalances all over the world in history? Moreover, whose profligate monetary policies led to the Great Financial Crisis that gave us the Great Recession?
So, the Fed loads the gun with financial causes and then pulls the trigger. In fact, I think it would be hard to find a major financial imbalance in the US that the Fed did not have a hand in creating or, at least, enabling. Therefore, if those are the only two causes, then it is always the Federal Reserve that causes recessions by its own admission.
And, yet, those Fed dons look so pleased with themselves.
Yellen went on to say that when the Fed is the culprit, it is generally because the central bank is forced to tighten policy to curtail inflation and ends up overplaying its hand. (She didn’t mention that the Fed’s monetary policy may have a hand in creating financial imbalances.)
Exactly, nor did she mention that the inflation they were “forced” to curtail always happens because of financial imbalances the Fed created or enabled. That is why I call our expansion-recession cycles, rinse-and-repeat cycles. Therefore, the Fed is only forced by its own ill-conceived actions. First you have to create the imbalance, which causes the economy and stocks to inflate, then you have to pull the trigger to shoot that down by tightening into a recession, which the Fed always does:
Bernanke elaborated on Yellen’s point, accusing the central bank of, in essence, murder. It takes an aggressive act on the part of the monetary authority to bring an expanding economy to a halt and cause it to shift into reverse.
Yellen and Bernanke were speaking at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association in Atlanta earlier this month in the company of current Fed Chair Jerome Powell.
As I demonstrated in my two earlier articles this week (“Does Inverted Yield Curve Indicate Recession?” and “What is an inverted yield curve and what does it mean?“), the Fed carries out this act of econocide by getting the yield curve to invert via its forced interest changes. As shown in those articles, every recession has been immediately preceded by a Fed-created inversion of the yield curve — the Fed’s smoking gun.
The Fed Fix Is Almost In
As noted in those articles, today’s yield curve has already slipped into its penultimate inversion. First (on December third), three-year notes started paying more interest than five-year notes. (The five-year was at 2.83% interest, while the three-year hit just over that at 2.84%.) In essence, investors were betting the economy would be a tad better in five years than it would in three.
Within a matter of weeks, the three-year notes were paying more than seven-year notes. Then, just about Christmastime, they started paying more than eight-year notes, inverting the yield curve even further out. The orange recession indicator light comes on when they take the next step of paying more than ten-year notes; and above that we go full recessionary red! The first three came all within in a month, so the rest may come just as quickly.
In fact, we’re so close that one more rate increase by the Fed could pull the trigger. This is why Powell can be so reassuring about pulling back soon on targeted interest-rate increases. He knows he’s already operating with a hair trigger because of the Fed’s other tightening action in rolling bonds off of its balance sheet.
Like a skilled sharp-shooter, Powell recently said the Fed is “watching and waiting” before it pulls the trigger with its next rate increase. At the same time, he suggested his balance-sheet reduction won’t end for awhile (and, of course, the Fed knows that its balance sheet reduction is skewing the yield curve faster than the Fed’s targeted interest-rate increases.
rest at link
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Slowly trickling it out for the normies to see. Whether they see it is a different story altogether.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-01-21/federal-reserve-confesses-sole-responsibility-all-recessions