Dear Members of Congress

http://nypost.com/2015/02/26/heres-what-janet-yellen-should-have-told-congress/

This is what Janet Yellen should have told congress

Dear Members of Congress:

Thanks for inviting me here today. Let me get right to the point so we can all get outta here.

I need to raise interest rates. Why? For one thing, the US dollar is becoming too strong against foreign currencies and that’s making American-made goods too expensive in overseas markets.

So it’s hurting the profits of our companies that sell overseas, while the profits of companies with businesses overseas are getting clobbered.

But on the other hand, I can’t raise rates. Why? Because we aren’t really sure just how strong the US economy is right now. We’ve been fooled a number of times over the past seven years. In fact, being fooled has become an annual event.

Improvement in the economy has often turned out to be nothing more than squiggles in economic data. The job gains over the past few months may be nothing more than “statistical noise,” as we smart people like to call it.

The raw data are not completely encouraging. The numbers only look good after they are adjusted for the seasons and for guesses as to new companies that are suddenly, quietly and magically being formed.

And what about the drop in the unemployment rate we hear about all the time? It’s mostly people leaving the workforce because they can’t find jobs. Sure, we at the Fed mention the drop in the jobless rate all the time. But we giggle when we do it.

A number we do look at is the Labor Force Participation Rate, and there are fewer people in the workforce now than there have been in decades. That’s bad stuff.

On top of all that, we are worried that the statistics we’ve been relying on are wrong. We are concerned that New York Post columnist John Crudele is right and that the jobs data are being manipulated or poorly collected. [Might as well plug myself, since I’m writing the speech.]

And then there’s the inflation rate. We say it’s too low and people assume we’d like prices to go higher. But that’s not what the Fed is talking about when we discuss the rate of inflation.

What the Fed is really saying is the low inflation rate isn’t confirming that the economy is picking up speed. If it were, inflation would be closer to the 2 percent a year that we target.

And besides, we at the Fed don’t trust the government’s inflation statistics either. Never have.

The core Consumer Price Index leaves out too many things. It excludes increases in food, energy and housing as if they weren’t part of the family budget.

So, I admit that we need to raise interest rates, but we can’t.

If we raise rates at the wrong time, higher borrowing costs might stunt any economic rebirth. Remember the “green shoots” from a couple of years ago? No matter how much
fertilizer we threw on them, they never sprouted into much.

If the recovery is already slow — and made to look better only through statistical tricks — we’ll really be in a fix if we allow rates to rise.

It’s called a quandary. And I admit that things are screwed up.

Right now we’ve created a situation that gives people rich enough to invest in the stock market without worry a tremendous advantage. In fact, our policy of near-zero interest rates has probably created a stock market bubble we will live to regret.

And the price is being paid at the other end of the economic spectrum — by savers who can’t, or won’t, invest in stocks because they know what is coming.

The middle-class saver has, in effect, been secretly taxed through the loss of interest income to help the rich big shot on Wall Street.

I know it’s not fair. I’m trying to do something about it, but my hands are tied.

All you really want to know is, when will I raise interest rates? Maybe June. Maybe not if, as happened before, the economy takes another turn for the worse.

Or if Europe, Japan, China or some other place in this crazy, mixed-up world causes me agita.

Speaking of agita, I’m going to lunch. Any of you want to come along and pick up the tab?