There is nothing wrong with being part of the flock—that is, if the shepherd knows what he is doing.
But we’ve now got two of them who don’t: One is domiciled in the Oval Office and is certifiably deranged on all matters of economics; the other is bivouacked in the Eccles Building and is hallucinatory about its feeble powers to cause prices to jump and economic growth to perk-up upon its command.
Yet the flock on Wall Street insouciantly ignores the terminal dangers posed by both. Apparently bound and determined to make yet another visit to the post-bubble slaughterhouse (for the third time this young century), they keep buying the dip in the face of screeching warnings that the Donald is this cycle’s proverbial Orange Swan and that the Fed is so lost and confused that it is pivoting wildly like some kind of unhinged monetary whirling dervish.
Still, that’s what happens when you replace the free market in finance with 12 monetary central planners at the Fed, and when you instill in the electorate the misbegotten notion that capitalist prosperity depends upon the beneficent policy interventions of the state (read “stimulus”) and most especially its central banking branch.
In the current instance, unfortunately, the electorate turned in desperation to the Donald because he appropriately condemned the failed policies of the status quo, which have generated unspeakable windfalls to the 1% and grinding stagnation and economic insecurity for most of the 90% down below.