Richard Fisher and Inflation

Richard Fisher, President of the Dallas Fed has been talking tough lately about inflation. He even dissented from the rest of the FOMC yesterday and voted for a 25 bps hike. (BFD) But before you get impressed that Fisher knows what he is doing and is the lonesome hawk or is serious about fighting inflation or defending the US dollar, please consider where he was on this topic in September. Click on this link. Okay - so now Fisher is fighting inflation, but just 9 months ago, he said we had “wiggle room”. I called bullshit on that when it happened with this post.

Here are a few of my prior comments about our Fed and their desire to deny that inflation existed or that we needed to do anything about it.

On September 6, 2007 - shortly before Fisher was talking about his wiggle room I asked Does Inflation Matter To Central Bankers? For a long time, it was convenient for Mr. Fisher and the other guys guesstimating incorrectly about economics to suggest inflation was not a problem or that it was going to recede in the future. Well, we are in the future now. As I suggested in that post, their desire to ignore inflation would catch up to us. Now their desire to deal with inflation is going to catch up to us.

Last June 14, 2007 when the market was flying high in record territory, I wrote a post discussing the inevitability of Global Inflation impacting the US whether we liked it or whether we wanted to ignore it. I am confident that Mr. Fisher didn’t care what I said back then - he was in good company.

In fact, he was in really good company. Like Mr. Kohn, another voter on the Fed who was still denying the threat of higher prices at the end of February 2008 when I wrote about Inflation-Adjusted Inflation. Just 4 months ago, Mr. Kohn was trying to convince us that we should not be worried about inflation because it would moderate in a few years. Maybe Mr. Fisher should have convinced him then about what we are dealing with now.

As you can tell, I am not impressed with Mr. Fisher and his inflation-fighting abilities or his inflation-fighting timing. But it doesn’t matter what I think. I don’t have a vote.

Comments

[User 30121]

You go man! Fisher the fool, much like his ilk at the floundering Fed!