The Economy

It's really sad to me that so little attention is getting paid to that sham investigation the Fed did of itself into Rob Kaplan and Eric Rosengren. Just as a reminder. ... When the Fed was in full hijack mode of the debt markets -- to "stabilize" them in 2020 -- buying up a massive dollar amounts of Treasuries, mortgage-backed securities and corporate debt, including junk bonds (and creating runaway inflation we're all still paying for), Kaplan was the president of the Dallas Fed and Rosengren the president of the Boston Fed. They had advance knowledge of what issues the Fed's trading desk in New York was going to buy and when. ... and Kaplan in particular, was doing a Raj Rajaratnam impersonation, trading like a hedge fund manager sitting on juicy insider information. He was executing million dollar trades. Rosengren made numerous trades in funds that were invested in mortgage-backed securities -- front-running the Fed's actions (if you had advance knowledge of what they were going to buy, you could make guaranteed money).

Jay Powell never addressed the corruption, he just kept stalling and covering for them, and who knows if he is part of the corruption enriching himself too on his ability to rig the game.

Two years ago, I posted this about a reporter from Bloomberg who put Powell on the spot on an unrelated conference call, because the Fed wouldn't be transparent and release Kaplan's trades:

That reporter tweeted this yesterday:



The report the inspector general they appointed to investigate themselves put out yesterday is laughable. But no one cares or is paying attention, so they can just do a giant "f you" and get away with it.

 

The Fed Board Ethics told the Dallas Fed that before his forms were made public, the disclosures need to have more specificity, including the dates of his trades. ... but Kaplan said he didn't have time to do it.

That's actually buried in there because. ... well, they know nobody is going to even read the report, let alone understand what it is they were doing to rig securities prices higher -- making the rich (including themselves, as it turned out) richer.

Bored Ape NFT, indeed.

 

Commercial banks, same as they are currently.

 

It's seasonal.

Gas prices are almost always lowest this time of the year, hitting a seasonal low in early February. Demand is at its lowest during the winter. If this year is typical, prices will start to climb after that into Memorial Day, which is around when you get a seasonal high during most years. That will have zero to do with Joe Biden, as well.

 

It's a silly game. Gas prices are higher than they were when Joe Biden was elected. He might not control the price of gas directly (except when he was emptying the strategic petroleum reserve to manage his poll numbers), but his presidency has been marked by huge amounts of government debt on out-of-control spending which required extreme debt monetization that showed up in the prices consumers have been seeing in all kinds of things.

It's not like 100 million people on the lower end of the economic spectrum are going to be convinced that they aren't struggling to make ends meet or that their costs haven't risen dramatically over the last several years because of week to week price fluctuations in gas. Overall prices aren't declining. Even if you believe the CPI accurately measures anything, prices across the board, according to it, are up close to 20 percent since he was elected and were still rising at a 3.4 percent annual clip in the last number drop they did. In that environment, it shouldn't be any surprise that any president, Joe Biden or otherwise, would be as unpopular as he is.