[onlyrealcuzzo]

You can't avoid the bust unless you avoid the boom. But the Fed makes no effort to avoid the boom.

[dcftoapv]

wtf are you talking about? They were raising interest rates and rolling assets off their balance sheet for the better part of 2018.

[legolas2412]

And they kept the interest rates zero from 2008 to 2015, and spent trillions to prop up asset prices via quantitive easing.

When they pumped the price to astonishing heights till 2015, what they did in 2018 was too late.

[dcftoapv]

Too late for what? This was going to happen no matter what the fed did. If the mkt blew up because of inflation then your argument would make sense. That's not what happened.

[legolas2412]

Well if the quantative easing was phased out and interest rates started increasing in 2011, the stock market wouldn't be at all times high, billionaires wouldn't be so rich, but the economy would be better off.

[dcftoapv]

You're just making things up. We couldn't have increased interest rates if we wanted to because Europe had to hold their rates low to deal with their debt crisis. If we moved ours out of step then it would have caused appreciation in the dollar and likely would have damaged US manufacturing. The US lower middle class likely would have been hurt if we did what you just suggested.

Yes, inequality is a massive economic problem. Yes, we need to find a way to fix it. Spouting poorly formed conspiracy theories about financial markets is not the way to do it. We weren't holding rates low to inflate equity markets. The fed doesn't care about equity markets more than any other economic gauge. We were holding rates low because we were trying to minimize unemployment and there were no signs of inflation.

When we started getting nervous about inflation, we started increasing rates, and selling off the balance sheet. That didn't go terribly well which is we stopped.

The fed is a completely apolitical institution that works very hard to monitor and assist the economy. They are academics, not billionaires. Their sole purpose is to make sure that you have a job and don't have to worry about the price of milk increasing 200% in a week.

Both of those things have been called into question this week, neither is because the fed didn't increase interest rates quickly enough.

I'm not going to assume anything about your political leanings, but I do want to address this. I have heard a lot of Bernie supporters spouting the theory that you just told me. The irony of that is that he wants to put labor reps on the fed. You know what labor reps would push for? Super low interest rates to weaken the dollar and increase manufacturing activity. Their position is completely contradictory.