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I may be, but suffice it to say, I don’t have as antagonistic of a view of the Fed as you do.
It’s not that I think Fed actions don’t occasionally hurt working class Americans, I just generally ascribe that more to carelessness than malice.
The funny thing here (to me) is that you’ve wrapped around to agreeing with the capitalists. In general, Wall Street (meaning specially, equity investors) is very annoyed at Powell’s indifference to their protests against further rate hikes. My understanding is that industrialists aren’t pleased either with the increases in financing costs, but I’m less close to Main Street these days.
So everyone seems pretty mad at him…
Also, if his goal was to target wage growth specifically at tech and financial firms, he’s done a miraculously good job. As far as I’ve been able to tell, the huge layoffs in the Valley and on the Street have been overwhelmingly top quintile incomes. And anecdotally, most people are getting snapped back up, albeit at sometimes lower income. On the other hand, a year ago college grads with no experience were getting 200k offers at Amazon and refusing to entertain anything lower. We are precisely the people who have been stubborn in our inelastic consumption in the face of rising costs and it’s pretty clear why that’s been the case.
That all said, I’m willing to agree that I might be being too soft. I still think rate hikes were the wrong medicine for the macroeconomic and market dynamics we saw in ‘22. I do think he’s gotten a bit lucky with broader employment and GDP. Let’s hope for all our sakes that they continue to be lucky…
