Oh What a Tangled Web…

Caught in a Web

Removed from the world

Hanging on by a thread

Spinning the lies

Devised in my head

-        James LaBrie, John Petrucci

The Fed is trapped.

The official data on both unemployment and consumer price inflation suggest the Fed has met its policy objectives and should not be hesitant to raise rates.  Of course, when they increased rates by a measly 0.25% in December, the markets went haywire.

So, Steve Liesman asks Janet Yellen (from Zero Hedge):

Madam Chair, as you know, inflation has gone up the last two months. We had another strong jobs report. The tracking forecasts for GDP have returned to two percent. And yet the Fed stands pat while it's in a process of what it said at launch in December was a process of normalization.

So I have two questions about this. Does the Fed have a credibility problem in the sense that it says it will do one thing under certain conditions, but doesn't end up doing it? And then, frankly, if the current conditions are not sufficient for the Fed to raise rates, well, what would those conditions ever look like?

Yellen responds with 261 incomprehensible words (Zero Hedge counted, I didn’t).  After the video clip of this Q&A, CNBC went to an exchange between the aforementioned Liesman and Rick Santelli.

It should be explained: Santelli is as close as CNBC dares get to calling BS on just about every government manipulation.  Liesman might as well be a Fed mouthpiece.

With that:

Santelli: Steve, could you understand any of it? Any of it seriously? Just a yes or no.

Liesman: Not much, it was not precisely responsive to the question I asked.

Even the acolytes cannot pretend anymore, it seems.