Americans, The Fed, and Bond Markets Agree on Inflation

American citizens, the Fed, and bond markets all know: Inflation isn’t under control.

When the Fed prints, they write inflation on the wall. And even if they do everything “perfectly” to return inflation to the target of 2%, that’s just slowing down the pace of their stealing. Your purchasing power is still robbed from you, but it happens at a slower rate so that you don’t notice. But as the Fed normalizes incrementally more extreme “emergency” measures, like 2008 stealth bailouts, massive QE, and Covid-era money printing, they make their own 2% target number impossible to achieve and maintain. 

Americans have felt it for a long time, but the frog continues to boil. Life keeps becoming less affordable, and even as the Fed knows that growth is weak and inflation isn’t going away, its answer to reducing “inflationary pressures” can only even be more of the same monetary policies that got us here.

All that anyone has to do is look at their grocery bill, gas receipt, or insurance payment, and compare to the same bills pre-Covid. The Fed has been forced to admit that inflation hasn’t gone away. And despite their affection for silly euphemisms like “transitory” when they think they’ve beaten inflation to “sticky” when they realize their solutions didn’t fix anything, the Fed is eventually always forced to acknowledge the failures of their monetary policy.