Exactly, the best time to raise rates was 6 years ago when the economy was humming along well. Instead the fed kept them too low creating huge bubbles, which it's now in the process of popping. These next few years are going to be a lot rougher than they needed to be.
This isn't just hindsight bias either. Plenty of people have been warning about exactly this problem for years.
They DID raise rates 6 years ago: from 0% in 2015 to 2.45% in 2019. It should have been done much earlier. And there was no need to push equity markets 50% up from pre-pandemic levels. That was the time for a soft-landing.
Why should they have raised interest rates? Standard economic dogma has it that below target inflation like the last 15 years needed low interest rates to get it back up. Or could it be that standard economic dogma is a steaming pile of horse shit?
Sure inflation was low for buying food or milk or whatever, but was much higher than 2% in some massive areas of the economy, like stocks and housing. Keeping rates so low created huge pressure to invest in high risk speculative assets. Crypto is basically the poster child for how absurd things have been in recent years.
I think you would need monarchy (or something more tyrannical) to get that. Democracies seem reliably short-sighted. The personal responsibility of taking on debt is so thoroughly attenuated in a democracy that piling on ($90k per citizen and counting, in the US) debt is the expedient thing to do, and it's seemingly impossible to overcome the electoral price paid for trying to reject that expedient option.
We had someone who was attempting something like tyrannical rule between 2016 - 2020 when the economy was going gangbusters. In his infinite wisdom he passed a ginormous tax cut, and then publicly lambasted the fed chair for modestly raising interest rates.
Not that administration is solely to blame for our predicament. The failure goes back even before the previous administration who had a mandate to make radical changes after the 2008 election cycle, and instead continued business as usual.
Wow, he passed a ginormous tax cut all on his own? Without the House and Senate both passing it first and sending it to him to sign?? That's extremely tyrannical! I can't believe I never heard about this, do you have any more info I can look at???
You should pay more attention. They planned to start hiking rates in ‘21 when inflation broke 2% but in their infinite wisdom they deemed it “transitory” and kept rates low and now look where we are.
Covid and the issues that caused should have been that long awaited wake up call to slowly ramp the money printer down.
Instead, they ramped it up and now we're here. The war is not the main cause of this, but was the monkey wrench thrown in the money printer, bringing down this house of cards.
This issue was years in the making, but they were just kicking the can down the road hoping the bubble wouldn't burst on their watch.
I think you're assuming some backstory to my comment that's not there.
But, for what it's worth, the rate hikes needed to start years before that, probably between 2013 and 2015. 2010-2020 was the window to make up for big spending.
AFAIK it was how Keynesian economics was supposed to work. Also AFAIK the only country that did intentionally tighten at the top always Israel as they were worried that an economic crisis would leave them vulnerable to attack from their neighbors *
* source is from a bar talk with an economist, I didn’t do my own research here…
Long-term prudence is how every system is supposed to work, but motive can't be considered in a system as diffuse as a government of 330million people. The US is Keynesian in bad times, and a giant tax cut celebration in the good times.
Unlike socialism, capitalism actually seems to fare better when under a siege mentality. The 50s to 70s was a period of strong growth and right-wing support for worker-friendly policies which made the lives of the ordinary person better, not least because of fear that poor working class conditions would lead to communist uprisings in Western Europe.
No monarch could ever have a sufficiently split personality to even mimic all the different ways things get pulled in a government where hundreds of people battle to make decisions. The US had (and has) no coherent vision but operates on a scale where that is not a viable option.
