Over the past year, Fed watchers have observed a deeply ironic and circular paradox: the Fed, which has been engaged in $120 billion in monthly QE ever since the covid crisis, has vowed it will continue to inject $120 billion in monthly liquidity – in the process making the rich richer, the poor poorer and decimating the middle class while pushing inflation higher – until such time as there is “substantial progress” on the employment front, meaning there will be no taper as long as the unemployment and labor participation rates remain elevated.
And yet, it is the Fed itself that is enabling this lack of “substantial progress” whatever it actually means, by monetizing the trillions in US deficit which makes it possible for Biden to send out periodic stimmy checks to the population, which eliminates the urgency for millions of Americans to go back to work, and also keeps the unemployment and labor participation rates artificially elevated even as there is a record number of job openings in the US at this moment.
Of course, the Fed knows this – it knows that most finance professionals (at least those who don’t merely play finance professionals as finance tv anchors) know this – but so far the Fed’s role in enabling this pernicious economic cycle has been kept out of the public view as the outcry would be vicious and would also risk a popular backlash against the central bank, something which the establishment needs to avoid at all costs, or else.
That’s why the Fed has been especially focused on finding diversions and distractions to its own role in perpetuating this circular scheme, distractions which include global warming, LGBTQ activism and now – minorities in jail.