Just a general thought/concern in regard to what Jerome Powell says. He‘s raising rates to attempt to attack demand and to bring inflation down. I was just thinking though—this process will eventually lead to layoffs—which will shrink the work force—which very well could reduce supply. He and a lot of the market experts claim that the biggest mistake they could make would be to stop raising rates too early and to allow inflation to sink back into the markets. My question is—wouldn’t raising them too much be far more catastrophic? If the fed raises them too much—supply will decrease along with demand—which isn‘t great for bringing prices down—and we’d have far more people unemployed—in a business environment where margins are compromised because of high rates. It honestly makes me feel like it would make it so that we kinda are where we are now—but just with a lot more people suffering economically. It really is starting to feel to me like the fed really needs to consider pausing a bit and seeing the effects of these rate increases as they sink in. I’m certainly not claiming they will do this—- but its starting to feel like them taking a slower and more surgical approach from this point forward is something that I would personally prefer to see.
Not only is this a possibility. It's a NECESSITY.
There are only two possibilities here.
1) The fed is actually dumb enough to think we can have a soft landing and we will be doing this all over again (but 4x as bad) in another 3 years.
or
2) The fed knows that a hard landing is a necessity but is smart enough to know they're not allowed to say that part out loud.
I could write a book on why I feel this way but it would be so long no one would read it. So the TLDR version is basically that recession is not only a normal part of capitalism, it is an
extremely necessary part of capitalism. The longer we delay a natural recession, the worse it will be when we finally have to let it happen. We've artificially delayed this one so many times now and are so stupidly overdue for a reset.
People that got labeled "permabears" like Michael Burry and the like weren't wrong in the end. They just underestimated just how far and long the fed would go to delay the recession, growing the bubble larger and larger all along the way.