If you don’t immediately recognise the title for today’s post then I must first warn you that your knowledge of Lewis Carroll’s literary works is dangerously deficient.

So why am I thinking of Alice in Wonderland today? Well it is Fed day, and for me the Fed always bring Wonderland to mind. I was talking to my older son a few weeks ago explaining that in the same way that lawyers trained for years to achieve a state where they could swallow (figurative) camels and yet still strain at gnats, economists went through a process where after years of patient study that seemed to require at least a PhD, they achieved a state where measures that looked reckless or even suicidal to the less trained eye were revealed as both sensible and necessary.

He asked whether the Fed’s track record at steering the economy in the past was impressive, and I told him that it had delivered a succession of ever greater disasters over recent decades. He then asked why people still nonetheless trusted the Fed to deliver policy, and I replied that people had to believe that the Fed knew what they are doing, as the alternative was just too terrifying. I added that the Fed never admitted to making a mistake, which reassured many, and that Ben Bernanke had an impressively bushy beard that had inspired confidence, though Yellen had needed to manage without one so far for technical reasons. (more…)