The arbitrary centrally-planned foundation of the economy has been clear to those paying attention on the way down, as rates were repeatedly lowered further and

The arbitrary centrally-planned foundation of the economy has been clear to those paying attention on the way down, as rates were repeatedly lowered further and further over decades for one political purpose or another. What has surprised me is that the Fed did end up having the will to raise rates a decent amount. So it seems the Fed actually has been following their technocratic mandate, just with horribly broken criteria based around consumer price inflation - horribly broken because the real price of manufactured goods should have been dropping significantly due to offshoring and technological progress, but the Fed's feedback loop created enough new money so they couldn't (hence the ever-growing asset bubble). As a libertarian student of Austrian economics, seeing this play out is actually warming me up to Modern Monetary Theory - at least it means the newly created money gets directed to deliberate purposes (like sorely needed infrastructure), rather than just handed to banks in a mostly undirected manner while feigning austerity for everyone else.