Lux Lucet

The Eccles Building in Washington D.C., home office of the Federal Reserve.

“We have a 2 percent symmetric inflation objective. For a number of years now, inflation has been running under 2 percent, and I consider it an important priority to make sure that inflation doesn’t chronically undershoot our 2 percent objective.” So said outgoing Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen last week in the course of assessing her on the job performance over the past year.

According to her, everything else is pretty awesome. Unemployment’s down. The economy’s growing at a 3 percent clip. The stock market may be a little pricey but it’s really nothing to get too excited about.

Why, if it weren’t for that persistently low inflation, she’d be batting close to 1.000 and having an all around MVP year here in 2017.

What shall we say to all this? It seems to me that the first order of business is to translate Yellen’s inflation comments into plain English. Academics, politicians and others who wish to hide their meaning from the general public love to use obscure language. But one of the chief jobs of any Christian teacher, whether he’s a blogger or a preacher it makes no difference, is to penetrate the fog to permit a fruitful discussion.

That said, here’s my translation of Janet Yellen’s Fed Speak: “Our objective here at the Fed is to steal 2 percent of the value of the deplorables’ savings each year by creating credit a pace that is faster than the actual rate of growth of the economy. This, combined with our holding interest rates near 5,000 year lows to keep the rubes from earnings any interest in their savings accounts, represents a one-two punch to the middle class. By employing these policy tools, we enlightened folks here at the Fed can strip mine wealth from unsuspecting nobodies, who don’t deserve what they have anyway, and put it into more worthy hands, namely, those master of the universe types who own the banks and pay our salaries. Unfortunately, I was not as successful in this regard as I would like to have been.”

Now that’s more like it. We’re finally getting somewhere. No doubt, Janet Yellen would be greatly offended by my translation, as would pretty much any other central banker, mainstream economist, investor, or financial commentator. Perhaps some of the defenders central bank orthodoxy in academia, the press and in government really do honestly think that debt-based, central bank issued, fiat currencies actually serve the public interest. But that hardly gets them off the hook. They should know better, for the evidence is overwhelming that the current system – which is of, by and for the bankers – is a massive, and profoundly immoral, wealth transfer mechanism.

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