The Federal Reserve set the tone for 2021 with the release of the year’s first Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting minutes last Wednesday. With the national debt approaching $28 trillion and covid still not eradicated, there appears to be no intention of ending accommodative policies any time soon. However, the Fed still has a way of never disappointing when it comes to what is discussed behind closed doors. As the minutes reveal, they found:
The emergence of a narrow Democratic majority in the Senate bolstered investor expectations for additional fiscal stimulus, prompting upward revisions to forecasts for economic growth this year.
This logic naïvely assumes a Republican-controlled Senate wouldn’t have the same or similar “additional fiscal stimulus” as the Democrats. It also assumes fiscal stimulus leads to economic growth. Should we continue along this train of thought, we may conclude that any Senate that favors perpetual fiscal stimulus is best since it creates perpetual growth!
We also see the usual Fedspeak, surprising only in its inventiveness:
The Committee’s employment and inflation objectives are generally complementary. However, under circumstances in which the Committee judges that the objectives are not complementary…
This is difficult because it falls back to the idea of a tradeoff between inflation and unemployment. Of course, the problem with this “theory” is that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. How such an inconsistent theory can ever be relied upon, much less used as a planning tool to form the Fed’s primary mandate, remains a mystery.
And for those unaware, the Fed undertakes desk surveys ahead of its FOMC meetings. The surveys are carried out by the New York Fed; they ask a variety of primary dealers, i.e., those firms able to trade directly with the Fed, questions. Then, a survey is conducted with market participants, comprised of institutional investment firms. According to their expert opinion:
The Desk survey results indicated that a majority of market participants anticipated that the pace of net asset purchases would remain stable for the remainder of the year and slow around the first quarter of 2022.
According to plan, the Fed will continue its $120 billion of asset purchases for twelve more months, meaning we can expect at least an extra $1.44 trillion of US Treasurys and mortgage-backed securities added to the balance sheet a year from now. This assumes there will be no more “additional fiscal stimulus” packages or any surprises which warrant the Fed to take on more forceful actions. The only thing more troubling than the best-case scenario of adding another trillion to the balance sheet is the erroneous widespread belief that the Fed will slow down its purchases ever again.
Last, but not least, the issue of inequality as it pertains to the black and Hispanic communities was addressed:
Many participants stressed that sustained support from fiscal policy would help address the hardships faced by these groups and that monetary policy could also help by promoting the economy’s return to maximum employment and price stability.
Here they suggest that the solution to poverty and living in an unfair society revolves around asking politicians and central bankers to intervene even more in the lives of those in need. Naturally, this requires the bureaucracy to get paid for its interference. The public is then left to hope that planners will apply the appropriate amount of intervention, calculating the incalculable and doing whatever it takes to make society more prosperous.
Targets like “maximum employment” and “price stability,” are used, because they show that the Fed is goal oriented. The Fed will claim to fight racial inequality through their support, but their support can only amount to increasing the supply of money and credit, and deciding who gets access to this new money first. If these money creation schemes actually work, one would think the Fed’s goals would have been met by now. Can we really trust that by Q2 2022, as the survey says, the expansion will slow once the Fed finally hits its targets?
What the FOMC meeting ultimately fails to recognize is that by the time we get to March 2022 the only things to change will be the size of the Fed’s balance sheet, the money supply, and the increase in hardships faced by the very same groups the Fed is trying to help.
