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I don't think Powell or Yellen care one way or the other if they crush the economy. They are so insulated from the real world it doesn't impact them directly. It surely doesn't put their jobs at risk. For many of these swamp creatures, failure gets them a promotion! But reading your report with all the vacillating between QE or QT or pivoting, the only thing I kept thinking is the Fed is WAAAAAY too involved in the economy. All of this tinkering has created an unnatural economy with Wall Street trying to second guess the next move so they can game the system. What a horrific mess.

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Oh, Man, that is so true. The best thing we could do for markets and the economy is to get the Fed entirely out of them. Set it with one task -- maintaining the money for zero inflation. They'd hate that because it would strip them of their massive power and influence. Their only mandate would be a stable currency (well, and bank regulation). As I once wrote long ago, becoming a big bank CEO is a special kind of skill. You have to be able to take one of the world's most successful enterprises, make it too big to fail, then run it into the ground so bad that it demands a bailout. Only if you can wreck a truly massive and profitable bank with greed and then skillfully manage the politicians to where you make more on the bailouts than you did on banking are you qualified to be a CEO of a bank like JPMorgan Chase or Bank of America.

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I worked for a few years for a union pension consultant that managed institutional money managers representing different asset classes in a particular portfolio. I was a long, long ways from the action, and certainly not interacting with the likes of Jamie Dimon, but I saw enough of how the system works to learn some truly eye opening things about the "best and the brightest" in finance. It is the economic version of our health care system, and it is a big mess that continues to get messier. As George Carlin said, "It's a Big Club, and you ain't in it!"

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