Janet Yellen’s Press Conference Translated from Fedspeak into English

This week, the Federal Reserve held a press conference announcing that it would not raise interest rates. Of course, it’s sometimes hard to understand what the Federal Reserve is actually saying, so our good friends at the Carl Menger Center have graciously translated the press conference from Fedspeak into English:

YELLEN: Good afternoon. Today we decided to keep our accommodative monetary policy intact. We really have no idea what we’re doing, and markets have decided that they don’t want rates to rise too far above zero. And when they get angry, we get scared. So we’re just going to hold off and do nothing. As usual, we have come up with a bunch of projections for economic growth and the unemployment rate that have no correlation to reality and will be proven to be inaccurate, but not before we majorly screw up the economy, so the joke’s on you guys. We’ll continue to parrot the party line that job growth is great and ignore the fact that most of that growth comes among old people, part-time workers, and service industry jobs like waiting tables. But hey, a nation of waiters is still a great nation, am I right?

Inflation is still lower than we want it to be even though we’ve pumped a ton of money into the system. Of course, that’s because we’ve jiggered the figures to be low on purpose because that gives us an excuse to shovel more money to Wall Street. So just keep looking at these pretty dot plots and ignore how rich my buddy Jamie Dimon is getting. Don’t these dots here look like a fat dreidel? And hey, this dot plot looks like a bishops’s mitre. How fun!

Of course we do have a sinking feeling that things aren’t quite as rosy outside the US. But that’s because we’re not in charge over there. Rest assured, when China collapses and Japan and Europe fall into depression we’ll put on our most important-looking faces and act like we’re doing something other than peeing our pants. We’ll do substantive things and speak substantive words and you’ll know that they’re substantive because we’re doing and saying them. Substantive, that’s us. Oh yeah, and we won’t be raising rates again this year because Wall Street told us it’s not nice, so just forget about that “normalization” thing we’ve mentioned in the past.

You can read the entire thing here. Learn more about the Federal Reserve and why it should be audited here.