As an investor one must be disturbed by central bankers everywhere and their fascination with a 2% inflation target.
It's almost reached point of becoming the assured panacea of Central Banking Gods, the answer to all of the globe's myriad economic ills.
One of the first things any good medical diagnostician learns is, never make your diagnosis in the lab or base it on a lab result.
Just to take one example, mammograms, like it or not, they're a metaphor for labs. Yet data show 50% fail to detect smaller cancers. The list of false positives in lab work, blood, urine or otherwise, is long. If you can have false positives, you must have false negatives.
Yet central bankers--the so-called diagnosticians for monetary policy and economic growth--continue to worship at the alter of preconceived numbers. This seems to be about as fixed as fixed-views get, a view that could prove quite dangerous. Inflexible might be a more accurate term.
Most of the Fed folks are noted for their economic gobbledygook and their mind-numbing reports written in an even more mind-numbing style. Much of it wouldn't earn a solid C in a college freshman basic English class.
And this leaves out all those econometric model abortions the profession so reveres.
So one hardly expects them to be versed in the classics like Sophocles' Antigone:
The inflexible heart breaks first, the toughest iron cracks first, and the wildest horses bend their necks at the pull of the smallest curb.
Point being: We might all be better off--including the economy--if these folks spent less time soaking in the bathtub with their rubber ducks pouring over figures and a bit more reading estimable stuff like the classics.
A coiled spring will uncoil itself, absent time and interference.
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