Robert Ariail for March 29, 2022

Not just that the Fed is being slow to react, but also if the EU has a recession — because of the war in Ukraine — it will affect us negatively too. No matter how strongly you believe in nationalism, we still have an intertwined international economy and a long long way to go to be truly independent.

This implies quicker action by the Fed would have stemmed inflation. It would not have been able to do so. Inflation, as is easily observed, is a worldwide phenomenon.

At first glance, the arrested adolescent in me thought this was some “Your barn door is open” joke.

Isn’t Ariail’s comment on the same level? The causes ( and ‘cures’ ) of Inflation do not lend themselves to ‘bumper sticker’ slogans or poorly executed cartoons….

Oh, haha, it’s totally the Fed’s fault, even though CEOs are BRAGGING about their record profits they’ve “earned” by hiking prices across the board for everything under the sun.

The GQP is having a sh*tfit over gas prices. They would do the same if Biden did anything to stop Big Oil’s obscene profiteering. The same for every other issue today.

There’s a long and instructive story about feedback in systems with slow response times. TL/DR: If you have system with a lot of inertia (think about a giant freighter, or an acre-sized freezer), then you cannot effectively control it with a quick response feedback device. Look at the freighter. It’s gotten 0.1º off course, so you crank the steering wheel… and NOTHING HAPPENS. So you crank it harder. And NOTHING HAPPENS. So you crank it even futher and things seem to come back to normal. Yay. But suddenly, you’re off course the OTHER direction, so you crank it back… This can lead to disaster (see those movies about a tractor trailer rig with the trailer swaying, eh?). Instead, the proper behavior is to WAIT A BIT to see if the change is continuing (massive systems do tend to self correct). AFTER waiting a bit, you put in a tiny correction and WAIT quite a bit longer. And then, if it still needs some correction, do it a tiny bit again.

And so forth.

The amount of inflation is exactly such a metric in exactly such a system. The Fed is quite correctly making feather-light changes. I hope that they’re also going to correctly avoid too many changes too close together.

As if the Fed could slam the door on inflation. Less that 10% of the population believe that, so why this cartoon?

It’s gonna take a while.

Until the Fed hires psychics, it will always be in a “reactive” mode.

The Fed trying to stop inflation!That is a riot.

Nixon stopped inflation. He froze wages and prices. Well, wages of hourly, union employee’s, anyway. Salaried employees got around the freeze by changing job titles. Some prices were frozen, except for those that were allowed to rise by friendly politicians

Oh, the inflation is going away? Nice!