Tony Petroski

Preventing the Depression of 2009

This strikes me as a very bad idea: the government targeting the values for the S and P 500. Whatever it is, this is not the American way, and not democratic. When did our elites lose their faith in democracy? (Answer: just after it was invented). The Fed should produce stable prices when possible so the players in the economy have a useful yardstick to measure their activity. Fiscal stimulus should be the work of the people's representatives (Congress should anyone have forgotten). Thus it's a mistake to have the Fed lower interest rates to "stimulate the economy." They would properly lower interest rates to mitigate deflationary trends. All that is moot now as interest rates are zero. Why not let the Chinese communists play with this kind of stock-market smoothing and we can monitor things from afar and see how they do.