Gongol.com Archives: June 2025
June 19, 2025
Even without anyone prominently second-guessing him, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell has an unenviable job: In the midst of high uncertainty about everything from the Federal budget to trade and tax policy to geopolitical uncertainty, he's charged with figuring out how to gently maneuver the world's most important money supply through the twin goalposts of low inflation and high employment. ■ Because the Federal Reserve mainly depends upon managing interest rates as its tool for action, caution and predictability are the keys. The business sector likes certainty -- but so do families and individuals and all the other actors in the economy. If a church, for example, is fundraising to build a new sanctuary, its leaders will want to have a fairly good forecast of the available interest rates for when they borrow. ■ It does not make Powell's difficult job any easier when he is second-guessed from the bully pulpit and heckled for not cutting interest rates by 2.5 percentage points. Every rate change comes with unanticipated and second-order consequences, but a change of 2.5% (ten times the size of a more conventional quarter-point move) would not only forcibly reorder much of the investing universe, it would also introduce lasting and punitive uncertainty into perceptions of the economy overall. ■ The outbreak of the first serious pandemic in a century was cause for swift and dramatic rate-cutting -- it was the boldness of the reaction in a moment of extraordinary crisis that gave confidence to a panicky world. Today's circumstances are in many ways the opposite: Government policies are creating much of the meaningful uncertainty, and if the Federal Reserve were to start counter-programming against government policies, the result would be chaos, topped with a heavy layer of angry polemic against unelected Federal Reserve bankers. For now, slow and steady is the only way.
There is no human perfection, only a direction
In an apparent outburst of frustration, an individual blasted out a message to hundreds of thousands of social-media followers, lamenting that they "don't care anymore if this country destroys itself and burns down to the ground". The language is sufficiently inflammatory that the post itself was deleted, though Google confirms it once existed. If cooler thinking prevailed, then so much the better. ■ The radicalism of the outburst, though, highlights a gravely misguided principle for which everyone must keep perpetual watch in themselves and in others. It is the belief, conscious or not, that a utopia exists and can be reached. ■ Nothing is so exhausting as the perpetual fight against the utopian mindset. There is no perfect end state, nor will there ever be. Every social or political system built on the utopian fantasy has ended in tears or terror. Just within modern history, the Soviet Union never became a workers' paradise -- but it managed to murder hundreds of thousands directly at the hands of the state and millions more through systemic failure. ■ There is no "cleansing fire" to be had from burning down imperfect but aspirational institutions (like America's Constitutional form of government). There is only ever the slow, hard work of building, reforming, and caretaking along the way. Our greatest victories are often celebrated over the eradication of our own worst shortcomings. That is the very point of commemorating Juneteenth: The evil of slavery was overcome, much later and much harder than it should have been, and ultimately those too long denied their liberty were finally emancipated. ■ Something better is always possible, but to fantasize over something perfect is a path to terminal frustration. The Constitution correctly promises only a "more perfect union". Not an end state, but a striving towards better. It's a lesson everyone has to internalize, both now and in the future.
