- Giving up on finding a job…
- Why the Fed is far less powerful than many believe…
- Can you imagine stock market wins 138 times bigger than Nvidia? If you’re like most people, probably not. But then again, most people haven’t seen this report. But you can see it right now by clicking here.
Dear Reader,
Target is issuing 1,800 pink-shaded slips.
Amazon is issuing 14,000 of its own… while United Parcel Service is driving shortages in pink dye — it is issuing 48,000 such slips of its own.
Meantime, the latest United States’ official unemployment rate — August’s — came in at 4.3%.
That is the highest unemployment rate in nearly four years.
Nearly two million United States residents confronted long-term unemployment in August — defined as 27 weeks or more of idleness.
That is the highest total since 2022.
The September unemployment data has not come issuing. Nor will October’s unemployment data come issuing on schedule.
That is due to happy circumstances. I refer of course to the partial “shutdown” of the United States government.
Its statistical torture chambers have lacked the funding to mislead, deceive and misinform us through false unemployment reports.
And so my gratitude is very nearly limitless.
Yet I do not believe any upcoming unemployment data will encourage.
‘I Quit’
CBS News reports of a 41-year old New York City woman. She carries with her extensive experience in the digital marketing profession.
Yet for two hard years she knocked upon door after door. Not one prospective employer has risen from a desk to open it.
The ceaseless rejections have worn the very soul out of her.
“The job market has been brutal for quite some time,” she laments, adding that.
- If you have the ability to work, you should be able to.And that’s how the American dream happens. You pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and put in the work, and you’ll be rewarded.
- But that’s not happening anymore.
Alas, this former marketing maven has thrown up the sponge… and surrendered all hope of future employment.
Next month she will retreat to a Buddhist temple in upstate New York.
There she will exchange her labor for lodging. That is, she will dwell in a sort of indentured servitude.
Yet I hazard her example is far from rare.
The Fed to the Rescue!
Yet the unemployed should take solace. That is because the Federal Reserve suffers their pain.
And it is consecrated to their relief.
Last week Mr. Powell lowered his head in frustration, stroked his chin… and announced that “job creation … is pretty close to zero.”
More:
- Available evidence suggests that… hiring remain(s) low, and that both households’ perceptions of job availability and firms’ perceptions of hiring difficulty continue to decline… We’re here to [lower] rates at the margin that will support demand, and that will support more hiring. And that’s why we do it.
Yet why would lowering rates at the margin support more hiring?
This publication has taken to its rooftop — often — to yell about the Federal Reserve’s general impotence.
Around here, we believe the Federal Reserve is a man behind a curtain, a quick-change artist, a shell game schemer.
Its very business is false.
Its target rate, for example, centers upon a false market that no longer exists.
Here I refer you, as I have before, to Freedom Financial News contributor Jim Rickards:
- At times, the Fed seems to be at the center of the financial universe. It’s not…
- The power narrative crumbles quickly when we look at what the Fed actually does and how they do it. That’s a task the Fed does not want you to do because they prefer to hide behind a curtain of monetary omnipotence.
Sterilized Money That Just Sits There
Here Mr. Rickards exposes the Federal Reserve’s false fireworks:
- The Fed does print money (called M0) by buying U.S. Treasury securities and mortgage-backed securities from a select list of banks called the primary dealers. I was chief counsel and chief credit officer of a top primary dealer for ten years and we spoke to the Fed daily. So, I’ve had a front row seat at this process. When the Fed buys securities from a dealer, they pay with dollars pulled out of thin air.
- But since 2008, those dollars are then put on deposit with the Fed by the banks in the form of excess reserves. Those dollars don’t go anywhere. The Fed is simply expanding its balance sheet with securities on the asset side and deposits on the liability side.
- The Fed pays interest on those excess reserves, so the banks are fine with the arrangement. The actual dollars are not lent, spent or invested. They’re sterilized on the Fed balance sheet.
The business is but a “mirage,” this investigator continues:
- It’s all a mirage.
- The FOMC target rate for fed funds (called the policy rate) is… irrelevant. It is likely to be cut by 0.25% at the September 17 meeting. But the fed funds market to which that rate applies has not functioned since the 2008 financial panic. In other words, the Fed is targeting a rate for a market that doesn’t exist.
The Fed Profits Wall Street, Not Main Street
It is a mirage indeed, as argued Mr. Rickards.
Yet as I have argued before, it is a mirage Wall Street chases constantly.
And why shouldn’t it? Wall Street has profited fantastically from the Federal Reserve’s multiple monetary deceptions.
Main Street, mainly — do you get it? — has not.
Thus Main Street has grown increasingly alert to the Federal Reserve’s false but gaudy tricks.
With knowing eyes it penetrates the government’s unemployment myths.
Its lived experience clarifies in a manner that statistics does not… and cannot.
I hope merely that the unemployed among us — and the future unemployed among us — can somehow rediscover productive employment.
What remains if they cannot… but an existence of indentured servitude within a Buddhist temple?
Regards,
Brian Maher
for Freedom Financial News
