The Fed's Real Mandate; Inflation, High Inflation, Hyperinflation; The Fraudulent Social Contract of Bad Money Regimes
'Quiet Quitting' Isn't Just About Jobs; It's About a Crumbling Economy; Flooded Electric Vehicles Spontaneously Catch On Fire In Florida After Hurricane
The Fed's Real Mandate
“The Federal Reserve has a legal dual mandate to minimize unemployment and price inflation. The current “dual” between the two mandates is to reduce price inflation by increasing interest rates to increase unemployment and kill businesses to choke off aggregate demand. This has been the most important economic and investment issue this year and this dual minimization procedure has dominated Fed policy for at least three-quarters of a century.
This is odd given that the Fed is in the business of creating money, the cause of price inflation, and it is responsible for all the largest surges in unemployment since its founding in 1913. Employing an army of monetary economists, macro theorists, and statisticians, the Fed appears to be pursuing its quixotic quest of the Phillips curve sweet spot of minimizing inflation and unemployment.
[READ THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH CAREFULLY. - JRD]
The real mandate of the Fed is serving its masters, the political elites, by financing government spending and debt, bailing out cronies, and supporting the political process, including the Fed’s own interests. Everything else, including the inflation and unemployment rates are derivative of the primary mandate. The so-called dual mandate is just subterfuge to protect the Fed’s “confidence game.”
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Inflation, High Inflation, Hyperinflation
“Hyperinflation? Yes, it can happen here, and the more officials deny hyperinflation is possible, the more they create the conditions that causes it.”
“There is quite some empirical evidence that increasing the amount of money over time is associated with rising goods prices—be it in the form of consumer goods prices and/or asset prices such as stocks and real estate.”
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The Fraudulent Social Contract of Bad Money Regimes
“This article is adapted from A Guide to Good Money: Beyond the Illusions of Asset Inflation by Brendan Brown and Robert Pringle (2022, Palgrave Macmillan).]”
“Bad money regimes base themselves on a dysfunctional social contract.”
“Progressives are fond of telling us that we are under a ‘social contract’ with the government, in effect justifying whatever abuses authorities inflict. Putting up with massive inflation is the latest iteration of this so-called contract.”
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'Quiet Quitting' Isn't Just About Jobs; It's About a Crumbling Economy
“The unraveling of hyper-Globalization and hyper-Financialization will generate consequences few conventional analysts and pundits anticipate.”
“TikTok videos on 'Quiet Quitting'--doing the minimum at work, giving nothing extra to the employer-- have gone viral, and The Wall Street Journal quickly picked up the thread:
If Your Co-Workers Are 'Quiet Quitting,' Here's What That Means Some Gen Z professionals are saying no to hustle culture; 'I'm not going to go extra.'
The movement away from putting career first and sacrificing to get ahead financially is global: From the Great Resignation to Lying Flat, Workers Are Opting Out In China, the U.S., Japan, and Germany, younger generations are rethinking the pursuit of wealth.
Here are a few excerpts from the WSJ article:”
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Flooded Electric Vehicles Spontaneously Catch On Fire In Florida After Hurricane
"There's a ton of EVs disabled from Ian. As those batteries corrode, fires start," according to Jimmy Patronis, Florida's top financial officer and fire marshal.
Patronis tweeted Thursday that after Hurricane Ian made landfall last week and flooded regions of his state, a bunch of electric vehicles (EVs) were caught in floods, batteries were waterlogged, and some spontaneously caught on fire.