by Rick Ackerman
RickAckerman.com
Picture if you will the Fed governors and their midget boss sitting around a long mahogany table, each in his best Emmett Kelly pastiche: bulbous red noses, scraggly mops of rust-colored hair, size 36 shoes, kayak-sized white lips framed by five o’clock shadow that looks to have been sprouted from a rat’s ass. That’s how I would suggest visualizing the Open Market Committee if you’ve struggled to understand Fed ‘policy’. With this image in mind, you can now savor this lead paragraph from Wednesday’s ‘Money & Investing’ section of The Wall Street Journal: ‘Federal Reserve officials are trying to signal that another rate increase is likely while at the same time questioning whether the economy can expand fast enough to justify lifting them much beyond that. It is a confusing combination that is sapping the Fed’s influence over markets’.