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THE FED IS FEELS When I say the Fed sets rates on feels, I mean it in the most literal sense. See the quote[1] below, where they admit setting rates based on what they "felt like" in the morning! That piece[1] gives a behind-the-scenes look into how Fed officials "reached their decision." It's as retarded as you can imagine. Literally what FOMC members do is wake up, scroll the news feed, then push a button to make rates gyrate. Just like you, fr fr — except the Fed is for real. Fed apparatchiks use months-old data[2] to steer the economy, which is like steering a car by mail. They don't have realtime dashboards that show what their rate changes are actually doing to millions of firms. They certainly don't have controlled experiments on the impact of Fed policies...because they change rates for the whole economy at once. Moreover, they make decisions as a committee, based on the internal politics of the FOMC and the external pressure of the press. The difference between a step up from 1.25% to 1.5% is much bigger proportionally than from 4.5% to 4.75%, but they talk about them similarly. There is no more "science" here than there was during COVID. When you immerse yourself in their minutes[3] you realize they're just picking numbers out of a hat, just like the South Park clip[4]: Future historians will regard the entire process as insane. A few unelected bureaucrats are setting rates for the whole world, all while justifying their politically motivated groupthink as "data driven." I mean, look at the rate graph[5]. Does that look like the dispassionate solution to an equation for optimal control of the economy? Or does it look more like a political tracking poll...gradually tilting downward because low rates poll well? I could go on at length, but at this point you start to get to the core of the issue. The Fed defenders will log on and start saying things like "what, do you want to take away the Fed's control over interest rates? Then they can't HELP people! They can't guarantee[6] full employment, and that's one of the Fed's two mandates!" This is what gives the game away. Keynesianism is just stealth Communism[7]. And the Fed isn't "technocratic", any more than the Soviet Politburo was. It's statist theft. That's sometimes disguised sometimes as engineering and sometimes as compassion — but it's always just an excuse for total control by an incompetent state. Fortunately, we now have the alternative in the form of the decentralized network. As a sidebar...tradfi won't get this. They think of the Fed as the sun at the center of their solar system. They sometimes curse it, sometimes praise it, but they can't really imagine a world without it. Defi gets it, however. Defi users were born into fiat, but they also know about a different system where BTC is the center of gravity. So, they know about a system where the Fed has no control but you do. They know about a system where interest rates are set by a decentralized process, where buyers and sellers of loans simply agree on a rate between themselves, as is already the case in onchain order books[8]. And they know about a system in which monetary policy is set by algorithm[9], not feels. That system is the future.

balajis ↗