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The Fed's "Baffle 'Em With Bullshit" Strategy In 1 Simple Chart
Despite the promise of increased transparency, if you felt that deciphering Fed policy (other than uber-dovish, lower-for-longer, willing-to-wait, BTFD) became more and more confusing as the last few years progressed, you would not be alone. In fact, the complexity of the Fed's statements (not just the wordcount which we have noted numerous times) has surged from "Secondary School" reading level throughout Greenspan's era to "Post-Grad" comprehension at the peak of Bernanke's reign. Yellen, so far, has reverted modestly. As The Economist notes, this increased baffle-em-with-bullshit "Fedspeak" complexity is very reminiscent of the George Orwell's 1984-esque "oldspeak" or "doublespeak" used to keep a quiescent public bemused.
As The Economist notes, in George Orwell’s "1984", there was "oldspeak", "duckspeak", "doublespeak" and "newspeak". In modern central banking, there is "Fedspeak". One of the Federal Reserve’s principal means of communicating its views on monetary policy is to issue a press statement after its regular Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) policy meetings. These statements have become longer and more complex, according to a recent report by Rubén Hernández-Murillo and Hannah Shell of the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, perhaps contradicting their original purpose.
A noticeable uptick in the complexity of the FOMC statements occurred shortly after the Fed announced the start of quantitative easing in late 2008. As its balance-sheet ballooned, so too did the length of its press statements. Twice during this period the Flesch-Kincaid reading level reached 20, suggesting that Fed-watchers would need four years of postgraduate education just to parse what was going on—an onerous hurdle for a press statement that is meant to inform the public. (No such pattern is discernible for the European Central Bank, whose press statements have maintained a consistent undergraduate reading level of around 14 over the past decade.)
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So there it is... baffle em with bullshit writ large.
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good chart. although as a skeptic, one should consider if the rising complexity of the economic situation resulted in a more verbose description during Fed announcements.
Listen.
The first trifecta ever on first post.
A ZH first. Wake the fuck up Cornelius and get his shit fixed!
the longer the fedspeak, the quicker the hilsenresponse
"We droned on and baffled some folks...." Obama
We droned on and blew the fuck out of a bunch of brown people.
FIFY
At least the money spent on the misssiles helps with the GDP
dup
I thought the Greenspam was the worst, that was why they had the "Briefcase metric" or some stupid CNBC-ism.
But now that you mention it, I have not listened to any FED chairman/person/idiot since then so Greenspam could have been eclipsed...
good chart. although as a skeptic, one should consider if the rising complexity of the economic situation resulted in a more verbose description during Fed announcements.
good chart. although as a skeptic, one should consider if the rising complexity of the economic situation resulted in a more verbose description during Fed announcements.
Yellen, the penultimate over-achiever...
DaddyO
I know ZH has always cussed the Fed meetings with the number of wordcounts in the testimony BUT the last few days, I could swear that the number of headline posts on ZH has gone up a ton and most of them have been shitty quality ones like these!
piled to infinity
but but we now have hilsenrath with his - hundreds of words - reading of the tea leaves clarity mere moments after release
They have lost all respect
Loss of Respect scuppers all .
See
https://www.academia.edu/9354151/The_Economics_of_Disrespect_
Or
http://andreswhy.blogspot.com/2014/11/economics-of-disrespect.html
For the last time. The Fed's goal is and has always been about maintaining power and control over real assets, including the human kind. Forever transferring real wealth and power to a relative few.
They and their owners have been successful beyond their wildest dreams you stupid fucks keep accepting and using thier promissory notes.
100+ years and counting...
For fucks sake, give us something we can trade...
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ``I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.'' Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
``While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement."
Orwell, "Politics and the English Language" 1946
H. L. Mencken
Looks to be the complete opposite trend of "state of the union" speeches:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/feb/12/state-of-the-un...
I've always viewed this phenomenon as more a function of disagreement amongst the Fed Heads, not with respect to the Dove Bar endless dessert policy, but on how to spin their fear-based (in)action, which even they realize is unsupportable.
FOMC proclamations are like reading Kant... through a straw.
Both largely distill to "there's a fuck of a lot we don't and can't know about or control for."
The thing is, we never put philosophers in charge of The Republic, one has to wonder why we'd put economists in charge of the economy and banks.
I think Stan Fischer is most of all going to do what is optimal for maintaining the American war machine, hijacked, as it has been, by the MIC and Israeli dual nationals.
Stanley Fischer: AIPAC's Fed Candidate on Iran WarpathIt is ....infuckingcredible that he was appointed, without objection, given his anti-American past actions, and warmongering on behalf of a foreign state.
In the beginning was the word. And the word was .... bull shit!
Economy = ManipulatedCharts²
The fed's upped the ante; they just don't give a flying fuck now. CPI should be measured by the amount of severed banksters heads in a basket.
I'm 'FEDupped' too
The 'basket' of goods is right, but if bankster heads in baskets (x) goes up, you've got inflation....
not sure that's what you were aiming for, since it seems objectively true that a larger number of heads in baskets would be a good thing for real output, real wages, employment and productivity (and would also reduce the volatility of measures of each).
So you want some mechanism that increases as the number of heads in baskets decreases.
(1/x) has attractive properties: if zero bankers are decapitated during the period, inflation is infinite (and hence there is an incentive to decapitate at least one per period); there might get to be a problem when the world runs out of bankers, but it would be a nice problem to have.
It's not meant to inform the public, it's meant to cover their own and bankers' asses.
People are pretty dumb (average iq = 100), but they aren't idiots (IQ of 12).
"My sentiments exactly" ... John Gruber
the greater the lie the more people buy it, upto a point.
Can't fool em all the time but you can give it a good run for their money. Madoffian mantra.
Here's how the banksters should be dealt with.
Also points out the level of government collusion with the bastards
Worth the watch.
damn
there's a chart for everything
Reading level is false measure of intellect. A great mind makes the complex simple. Men improve when they take from the complexity of nature and refine out an essence. The Fed's presents are like a doctoral thesis which is hoped to be judged by its length. A great mind changes the frame of reference to simplify the complex. Einstein explained relativity by pointing out that if one judged time on a clock from which you were moving away at speeds approaching the speed of light, the observed time on the clock slowed while you and everything moving with functioned the same. Time was relative to changing distance.
The Fed's statements are full of fluff and length signifying nothing. The simple is the Fed expands the money supply while the production of the US shrinks. This has always failed.