Macroscope | Does Fed chairman Jerome Powell want to be remembered as Scrooge who ruined Christmas? Let’s hope not
It was the night before Christmas, and old Scrooge sat in his counting house in Washington DC. A gloom resembling that of the US Federal Reserve pervaded Scrooge’s office and he himself bore more than a passing resemblance to Fed chairman Jay Powell. A single candle lighted his desk and served to warm his hands as he thumbed through the ledgers of federal finances.
“Mr Scrooge, sir,” asked his clerk Bob Cratchit in a trembling voice. “Might I possibly have tomorrow off to be with my family on Christmas Day?” Scrooge scowled deeply: “What’s Christmas got to do with it? There’s been too much merry making already in this country, and anyway I don’t pay you to be with your family.”
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Cratchit crept back miserably to his desk and as he did so, Scrooge’s nephew (who in turn bore a striking resemblance to Donald Trump) breezed into the counting house and cried: “Happy holidays Uncle. I hope you’ve got a Christmas rate reduction in store for us.” But Scrooge snarled: “Bah! Humbug! All you’ll get from me is a rate increase. So, be off with you!”
“But Uncle,” protested the nephew. “What about the spirit of giving at this time of the year?” Scrooge looked for a moment sad as well as angry. “There have been too many monetary giveaways already around here and look where it has got us – into a state of monetary euphoria and debt dependency. It’s goodbye to all that from now on.”
Scrooge cast his mind back to the days of Fed chairs Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen, who had occupied the counting house before him and who had doled out vast quantities of money in the form of quantitative easing, or QE. “Didn’t we give away piles of money, and not just at Christmas?” he snapped. “And now all we have are mountains of debt.”
His musing giving way to an angry outburst, Scrooge hissed at his wretched and shivering clerk: “You, Cratchit – get back to calculating your ‘dot plots’ and earn your coppers the hard way. Don’t look to me for charity.”