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Affectionate_Law3788 t1_ja8x4iy wrote

Reply to comment by DueSecretary4174 in Baghdad Powell by cbusoh66

I mean you're trying to steer one of the world's largest economies while balancing competing goals (inflation vs employment) and a million different random variables that impact everything else. I think they're trying, it's just essentially an impossible task to balance both all the time. If you raise rates you fuck the economy, if you don't raise rates you're fucked anyway because of inflation.

The best you can hope for is to keep the system running smoothly in the long run. There would be even more catastrophic crashes without someone to conduct monetary shenanigans to apply the brakes in either direction. Obviously they overreacted to COVID and then waited way too long to start applying the brakes this time around, but that's hindsight.

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DueSecretary4174 t1_ja8xo7e wrote

It’s not hindsight. It was obvious they were out of control since 2009.

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Affectionate_Law3788 t1_ja8zp1b wrote

In 2009 the job market was still royally screwed, most real estate markets were still in the gutter, and in generally main street America was not very well off. People were choosing to drag out college longer because the job market was that bad. The only thing that was obvious was that not enough had been done to mitigate the effects of the financial crisis. That's the environment that helped lead to the passage of more banking regulation in Dodd-Frank in 2010, and probably contributed to rates being left so low for so long.

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