While the Federal Reserve talks a lot about how its rate policies have improved the economy, actual figures from inflation and unemployment don't back up any of the improvements they're claiming, and haven't for years. Now, the Fed is moving the goalposts -- saying low unemployment can no longer be a reason for a rate increase, only inflation, since inflation has also stayed lower than the target metric. As inflation generally rises when people have more money to spend, this implies that even though the unemployment figures are way down, and the stock market is way up, people and businesses aren't actually spending any more money. Why not? Simplest answer is "they don't have money to spend".

Yes, all this money "printing" appears to inflate only asset prices. It is a great generator of inequality.

Thanks, seeing someone else point this out makes me feel less bad about being monumentally confused.

Agreed! Here's Reuters to the rescue: https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/...

This is my layman’s understanding;

“The price of Big Macs should be rising at a steady rate. It is bad if the price of Big Macs falls. Let’s put in some policies to make sure the price of Big Macs rises steadily!

Oh wait, they aren’t rising steadily, they’re rising much slower! Our policies aren’t working! Hmm maybe it’s ok to have periods where Big Macs get cheaper, as long as there is an equal period afterwards where they make up that loss and get more expensive. We can call this symmetry!”

The article is basically calling this idea of symmetry a big joke.

Yeah. Good lord. I have no clue what’s going on.