Fed Rate Hikes, Fiscal vs. Monetary Policy and Why Again the Case for Gold?

I’ve been thinking about the current Fed Funds rate hike cycle, which is logically gaining forward momentum now that the Fed can stand down from its 8-year, ultra-lenient monetary policy cycle. That is because the Obama administration’s goals required a compliant Federal Reserve to continually re-liquefy the economy as its fiscal policies drained it.
With the coming of Trump mania and its very different fiscal policy goals, we will witness the end of much of what I considered to be the ‘evil genius’ employed by the Federal Reserve, mostly under Ben Bernanke. When he oversaw the brilliant and completely maniacal painting of the macro known as Operation Twist in 2011, I knew we were not in Kansas anymore. We’d gone off the charts and off the balance sheet into a Wonderland of financial and monetary possibilities.
What else would you call a plan to sell the government’s short-term debt and buy its long-term debt in the stated effort to ‘sanitize’ (the Fed’s word, not mine) inflationary signals on the macro? It was evil, it was genius, and it worked. So too did various other financial manipulations that took place before and after Op/Twist. And here we are.

This post was published at GoldSeek on Wednesday, 15 March 2017.