After last week’s air tragedy, maybe a poor thought process but please stay with me.
Would you ever get on an airplane if there was no pilot?
Would you be confident of reaching your destination safely? Of course not.
Whether you know it or not, you are living in an economic and financial “airplane” with Chairwoman of the Federal Reserve Janet Yellen as the pilot. The sad thing is this, even she admits the airplane is broken, I’ll explain why shortly.
Mrs. Yellen gave a speech Friday for the San Francisco Fed. The full text can be found here.
Before getting into the particulars, I must say it is “sad” to see our “pilot” go back and forth while not saying much of anything…and what was said was largely incorrect or misinformation. In short, I believe Mrs. Yellen was pandering to Wall Street with her continual line of “we will raise rates later but not yet, and when we do is will be gradual” (my paraphrase). As I have written many times before, the Fed cannot raise rates and if they did the markets will not even be open for trade within two weeks!
First and foremost, let’s look at a few of the Fed’s assumptions. They assume unemployment is 5.5%, the economy is growing and inflation is “too low” and well below 2%. Let’s pull these assumptions apart and then put them back together. Unemployment is not 5.5%, this is total fallacy. The workforce participation rate is plumbing 40 year lows now and those “not looking for work” …because they cannot find any are just thrown in a heap and forgotten about. This has the effect of making the “potential” workforce smaller than it really is, a statistical gimmick for the ages. If unemployment was calculated as it once was back in 1980, the rate would be above 17% as calculated by John Williams Shadow Stats. The 5.5% number is a hilarious fabrication Joseph Goebbels would be ashamed of!