[mholyland]

I've always thought that the Fed gets too much blame for the economy going badly, when all they can control is the interest rate and QE/QT. It's like an inverted pendulum PID problem[0] but with an unfathomable number of variables and stakes.

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5GvwWKkBmg

[jameslk]

Monetary policy has incredible sway over the economy, so they should bear the brunt of the blame. It's odd to me that everyone talks about how important democracy and elections are, but when it comes to the mighty dollar, the thing that runs this country and largely the world, all decisions affecting its value are made by a board of unelected individuals behind closed doors through opaque models. The FOMC membership itself partly consists of bankers elected by other bankers, which always seemed like a conflict of interest to me. The Fed deserves more scrutiny, if anything.

[pibechorro]

They introduce top down decisions on what is a bottom up complex emergent system. Beyond being an exercise in futility to control it that way, it introduces irrationality to the whole thing as it becomes a politically driven thing. That irrationality makes everything else behave that way and we loose any sense of "natural" trends and predictability. The bailouts are a perfect example, we are now surrounded by zombie companies and uninteted consequences which are making the whole thing more fragile and unstable.