Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud

Federal Reserve Chairman just said that his goal is to create mass unemployment.

He did not say that high employment levels lead to inflation, he said that his job was to reduce employment.

In addition to being a stunning outbreak of honesty, it also is an outright refutation of half of the Federal Reserve's dual mandate, to, "Promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates."  (The first two items are often referred as its dual mandate)

The Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, has said that more interest rates rise will be needed to cool inflation and the red-hot US jobs market.

“We think we are going to need to do further rate increases,” Powell said on Tuesday at the Economic Club of Washington. “The labor market is extraordinarily strong.”

The Fed chair’s comments came hours ahead of Joe Biden’s State of Union address to Congress at which he is predicted to tout his administration’s economic record, including strong job growth.

(Emphasis mine)

He is explicitly stating that job destruction is a goal. This is despite the fact that all the evidence indicates that it is supply chain issues, war, and monopoly rents that are overwhelmingly behind the not-so-recent inflation numbers.

This is despite the fact that the three month moving average is pretty close to the 2% rate that the Federal Reserve claims to have as a goal.

The best evidence is that they have already got inflation under control, but they do not care, because they want people to live in precarity and poverty.

I am stunned by the candor of Chairman Powell, but poverty and precarity while protecting capital and finance has been the mission of the Fed since its found.