Why the Fed Keeps Denying Its Role in Increasing Inequality

Today on the Brief:

• Three Arrows holds more than 6% of Grayscale Bitcoin Trust
• New platform for censorship-resistant blogging
• Coinbase announces new token potentials as anti-surveillance hodlers flood out 

Today’s main topic: Why the Fed keeps denying its role in inequality 

Some key takeaways from yesterday’s Federal Open Markets Committee meeting:

• Interest rates are likely to stay near zero through 2022
• Unemployment anticipated to average between 9% and 10% during last three months of 2020
• Economy expected to contract 4% to 10% this year
• No specific discussion of yield curve control
• Inflation expected to be 1.0% this year and 1.5% in 2021, lower than Fed target of 2%
• According to Chairman Powell, inequality has nothing to do with Fed policy

On this episode, NLW recaps the above and dives deeper on two of the points:

• Net inflation stats gloss over specifics, including food prices that have been rising at an annual rate of 17.5%
• The Fed’s pronounced role in exacerbating inequality by propping up artificially high asset prices, effectively locking low and middle income households out of the mechanism for economic advancement