From Policy to Pain: How the Fed Impacts Your Wallet
Artificial interest rate controls cause inflationary booms, depressing busts, and result in taxpayers bailing out wealthy bankers every five to ten years.
While businesses struggle to obtain loans and consumers suffer under extremely high interest rates, the Federal Reserve cautioned this week “against cutting US interest rates too soon or too much.”
The implication is that the Federal Reserve knows what the correct interest rate should be and when and by how much it should be cut. But for every other product, apart from loans, the market determines the price. And the market is never wrong.
The Fed deciding that it knows the right interest rates and quantity of dollars that the economy should have is extremely presumptuous. Even more worrying, the acceptance by the general public that the Fed is correct is an example of central planning.
Entrusting the Fed with superior knowledge over the market, comprising 330 million consumers and sellers, represents a frightening leap toward central authority dictating everything from health and education to how you raise your child or what media you are allowed to read.
Also, if the Fed knows the right interest rate and quantity of money, why aren’t they able to prevent economic crises and bank failures?
When it comes to most other products in the economy—shoes, cars, clothing—the price is determined by the market, and the market never gets it wrong. If the market price goes too high, people stop buying; if it goes too low, companies lose money.
So, we wind up with a market price that consumers are willing to bear and that companies can live with.
Most importantly, in our capitalist/democratic system, the only people who pay for those shoes, cars, and clothing are the people who buy them. If you think the price is too high, you don’t have to buy, and the government doesn’t force you to pay for your neighbor’s shoes.
Or at least, that is how it is supposed to work. Some administrations are more socialist than others, and you do find yourself paying for your neighbor’s shoes through taxes, but that is the subject of another article.
Today, we are discussing how the Fed distorts the economy by artificially controlling interest rates, which leads to inflationary booms, depressing busts, and ultimately results in taxpayers bailing out wealthy bankers.
Until the self-imposed destruction of the COVID lockdowns, the most recent economic crisis was in 2008, which resulted in over 8 million Americans losing their jobs.
Additionally, the U.S. Treasury Department used nearly $1 trillion of taxpayer money to buy up banks’ toxic assets and to make emergency loans to banks teetering on the brink of collapse.
These were private, for-profit companies that received payouts from public funds. From a free-market standpoint, the reason why toxic assets plummeted in value was that the risk was too high and the public didn’t want to buy them.
So, the banks effectively made a terrible product that consumers didn’t want, but which the government purchased with taxpayer money.
Even worse, in order to stimulate a failing economy, the Fed artificially suppressed interest rates until two years ago. As of December 2021, the federal funds rate target range was 0.00% to 0.25%.
And that low rate, along with dramatic increases in government spending and borrowing and the creation of money, resulted in the 9% inflation during the Biden administration. To rein in the inflation, the Fed began raising the federal funds rate, which currently stands at 5.25% to 5.50%.
This figure is the federal funds rate, the rate banks charge each other for overnight loans. The rate you pay for mortgages, car loans, and credit cards will be much higher.
The Fed artificially keeps the interest rate low when politicians want to give the illusion of economic growth. In 2023, after the Fed began raising interest rates, the low Fed rates of the preceding 15 years resulted in banks like Silicon Valley Bank sitting on investments that paid 1.79%, while new treasuries were paying 3.79%.
This meant that the banks had to pay more to borrow money than they were earning on their portfolio of loans and investments. SVB and several other banks went bankrupt, resulting in a $25 billion bailout.
Meanwhile, the entire banking system is estimated to be sitting on $620 billion in similar, unrealized losses because of artificial interest rate manipulation by the Fed.
The COVID lockdown economic crisis caused 120,000 businesses to close and 30 million Americans to lose their jobs. To compensate, the Biden White House, working with Congress on fiscal policy, and the Federal Reserve, implementing monetary policy, the deficit skyrocketed, the debt hit record levels, and interest rates were kept low.
As a result, Biden claimed the largest growth and job creation in history, as well as the highest inflation in 40 years.
Now, in addition to enduring years of lost wages, depleted savings, and mounting personal debt, Americans are grappling with the combination of inflation and high interest rates. All of which was enabled by the Fed’s policies
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