Monetary Newspeak

Call this monetary newspeak and be done with it.

The Wall Street Journal is supposed to be the paper of financial record, yet its cub reporter on the Fed beat doesn’t apparently know the difference between price destruction and “market functioning”.

Nor is Mr. Nick Timiraos hep to the fact that the Fed money printers haven’t stimulated any main street “economic growth” for years.

The central bank in September updated its guidance about how long its officials expect to hold interest rates near zero. Since then, officials have turned their focus to  refining an asset-purchase program that began in March to stabilize market functioning and now are focused on stimulating economic growth.

This quote is truly Orwellian. Every one of the bolded phrases embodies a deliberate attempt to obfuscate the true purpose and effects of Fed actions and to wrap what amounts to a relentless attack on the fundamentals of sound money in fatuous claims about furtherance of the public good.

For instance, do they really have to call running the Fed’s printing presses at warp speed “asset purchases,” as if the Fed were a mega-investment fund operating in behalf of the American public?

For crying out loud, for the better part of this century to date the Fed has been in the business of blatantly monetizing the public debt and related (GSE and corporate) securities with credits snatched from thin air. In fact since 1991, the Fed’s balance sheet has expanded by 25X compared to nominal GDP growth of just 3.5X.

SUBSCRIBE TO CONTINUE READING

$39
Monthly
$99
Quarterly
$365
Yearly



Already a subscriber?

Login below!