The Federal Reserve adjourned its annual meeting in Jackson Hole, Wyoming on August 26, 2023 without fanfare but not without consequence.
As always, lots of Very Serious Papers were presented by established figures in the art of monetary tinkering …
The Federal Reserve adjourned its annual meeting in Jackson Hole, Wyoming on August 26, 2023 without fanfare but not without consequence.
As always, lots of Very Serious Papers were presented by established figures in the art of monetary tinkering and manipulation. Most papers amount to esoteric confetti, as rewarding as a run-of-the-mill TikTok video, only denuded of thrill. Occasionally, however, a paper turns out to be a blueprint for a tectonic shift by the Fed. That appears to be the case this year, which is the subject of this video.
As a reminder to viewers, the last time a Jackson Hole paper gave rise to a major monetary shift was in 2019, when BlackRock presented a paper entitled, “Dealing with the Next Downturn.” As luck would have it, the title downturn arrived the very next month in the form of a huge repo crisis that was shortly thereafter followed by the rollout of Pandemic!!! Crucially the Fed’s response to these shock events—creating $5T in new reserves PLUS $5T in new bank deposits, in accordance with BlackRock’s paper—represented a material departure by the central bank from its response to the GFC in 2009; back then, the Fed was acting to bail out the banks, which it did by creating, say, $2T in new reserves without any need at all for new bank deposits.
To summarize: • 2009—no new bank deposits created by Fed, no inflation. • 2020—Fed creates $5T of new bank deposits, gets big-time inflation. • HUGE difference.
This channel produced a video about BlackRock’s 2019 paper entitled, “Larry and Carstens’ Excellent Pandemic.” Just look for the video thumbnail of Larry Fink staring lustily at the Shoney's, er, BIS Big Boy, and that's the video.
Flash forward to the recently-adjourned Jackson Hole meeting. There is one particular paper that, if implemented, would cause huge inflation and indeed piggyback on and turbo-charge the inflation that’s arisen from the Fed’s implementation of BlackRock’s 2019 paper. The new paper does answer, however, the..
