something that is fucked to me, and off center to the point of the tweet, is how monetary policy in US political economy is basically in thrall to this "money supply" mindset, especially in the neoliberal dominant era. government spending used to mean something else in the New Deal era. but all that stopped, and the only game in town is a single lever that adjusts the pain of borrowing.

the logic goes: higher interest rates means businesses contract, owners lay off workers, and demand goes down. thus reducing the price of things because people are broke. also, nobody wants to buy a big ticket item like a car or a house or take out a HELOC to fix a roof when interest rates are high, because the loan takes a bigger chunk of your ass.

and maybe there was some logic to that when 25% of the population wasn't functionally unemployed and that inflation was not being driven by the production and transport capacity of liquid fuel being shithammered for 8 months with an increasingly bleak future.

but i do not see how raising interest rates is going to do anything but bring more pain. the housing market is already batshit from speculators and short term rentals eating the excess inventory. no chance it slows down housing prices. tariffs have fucked construction, which was already pretty fucked anyway. people need places to live and everybody already moved back in with their parents 10 years ago. cars are a shit deal and lot inventory is high, used cars are astronomical. everybody with the option is already heavily disincentivized from doing anything except surviving, so making borrowing hurt more is just making everything worse but i don't see it actually slowing down consumption much more than it already is and was going to be with all the cuts to federal programs.

trump is obviously pissed, because low interest rates are when rich people can run wild with borrowing and VCs can do their scams and ponzi bubbles with all the easy credit. but the fed doesn't want to play along because the dogma is to raise rates when inflation goes up. i kinda assumed his attempts to pressure the fed for lower or at least stable interest rates would be kind of successful, but i guess that ship has sailed.

anyway all signs point towards a hard winter and policymakers at every institution doing what they can to make it worse than it had to be.