The Time

Are you ready for this?

Take a few deep breaths via your nasal passages and exhale them slowly through pursed lips. What will it do? Most likely not much. "Designing Resilient Monetary Policy Frameworks for the Future," that's the topic of the Fed's Jackson Hole confab this week.

That pathetic title, bereft of any semblance of creativity, one only a bunch of bureaucrats could conceive, tells you all you need to know about how pitifully lost these people are. The Fed needs to put its pitiful self and all the rest of us out of misery and just buy up everything including a neighbor's collection of gazelle statues on his front lawn. Japan is almost there and we all know how well Japan is doing.

Having painted themselves and the rest of us into a corner, the Fed is about to invoke the old what goes around comes around rule. In short, what this means is a portfolio of $4.2 trillion could soon be growing should another recession pop up.

"New realities pose significant challenges for the conduct of monetary policy," the WSJ quoted San Francisco Fed President John Williams who spoke last week about the shifting monetary policy. There are two things here, "new realities" and "shifting monetary policy" that should grab your attention. New realities is a euphemism for failed policies. It's a kinder, gentler way of saying: "We screwed up and don't really know what we're doing."

The new normal is actually more of the old stuff that didn't work in the first place. What this means is the Fed will most likely have to raise rates at least once, necessary or not, to preserve any shred of credibility inhabitants of Pluto still think it has. That gives them some tiny latitude to then cut rates in what could be called a crocodile tears gesture to sooth frayed public nerves.

One of the missing elements the Fed so desperately needs is productivity, a no-show this time around after enormously reckless monetary spending, still another sign Fed policy has been absent any snap or crackle. All that remains is the much feared pop. A while back MSM and Fed officials blamed lack of consumer partying. Now their new recreant is productivity. Without villains there is no need for heroes.

Fed Chair Janet Yellen was noted recently for offering this characteristic gem of hedging, "lower productivity could be curbing the economy's long-term growth potential and the central bank's ability to raise interest rates." Here's the real story. This central bank is like Brexit. All the predicted horrible consequences that pundits and scaremongers prophesied have not shown up. And they won't. Abolishing this central bank will rectify this mess quicker than one can find the hole in Jackson. And along with it all those terrible scaremongering warnings. It's the right thing--as was Brexit--to do and now is the right time.