Zero Interest Rates Are Welfare for the Rich

Recently the stock market seems to move in the opposite direction from the news.  If the economic news is good, the market goes down, and if the news is good, the market goes up.  This seems to be mainly because the market is looking at what the Federal Reserve is going to do.  If the economy does well, the Fed says it will raise rates, if the economy stays weak, interest rates may remain near zero.  Everyone seems to think that one reason the market is doing so well, hitting new all time highs, is because of the low Fed interest rates.

I think the Fed has meant well in keeping interest rates low, it has had the perverse effect of accelerating income inequality.  The main beneficiaries of zero interest rates are the wealthy.  For every poor or middle class person who buys a $100,000 house with a low mortgage rate, some billionaire has made hundreds of millions more in the stock market or in real estate or other investments that require many millions to play.  Low rates have disproportionately benefited the wealthy.  The Fed justifies this by saying that if had not done it, the economy would have fallen apart, possibly dragging us into a real depression.  This is partly true.  Interest rates are basically the only weapon the Fed has to stabilize the economy, but Congress and the administration have other weapons.  

Congress did pass Dodd-Frank adding regulations on the wildly irresponsible bankers who brought on the 2008 financial crisis, but it did almost nothing for the average citizen.  It's understandable, if some poor guy on main street goes bankrupt because his house was foreclosed, it's no big deal; it happens everyday.  But if Lehman Brothers goes bankrupt it's a very big deal, and everybody says it threatens the existence of America.  But there could be another, bottom-up approach.  Let the big guys accept the consequences of their malfeasance, and create a safety net for the people at the bottom.  It would have been more difficult, but it would have been fairer.  

The upshot is that the Fed, doing it's job to sustain the US economy, has greatly aggravated income inequality in America.  I think the Fed chairmen have been well intentioned, but it looks bad for Jews.  The Jewish chairman who ran the Fed, Greenspan, Bernanke, and now Yellen have taken actions which have enormously benefited their Jewish colleagues who make up a huge contingent of the financial community.  The US has intentionally or unintentionally pursued a racist solution to the great recession.  Barney Frank is Jewish, and Janet Yellen's deputy, Stanley Fischer, is an Israeli citizen.  Of course, the Fed took action to respond to the crisis, while the Gentiles in Congress did little or nothing.  Gentiles Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner did take action, and got some Gentiles in Congress to support them.  But everything was directed at propping up the wealthy bankers at the expense of the common man.  

Ironically, it's another Jew, Paul Krugman, in the New York Times who has most vocally espoused more robust fiscal measures by the Congress and administration to help the common man.  Like me, he is still ranting years later, that the US should have gone into debt to undertake more ambitious infrastructure projects.  In that case the common man would have benefited from the fact that the US could borrow money for these projects at ridiculously low rates, like the Wall Street tycoons were doing to fatten their own wallets.