mathbabe, A low Fed rate: what does it mean for the 99%? here. You know when you are in a pick up game and you cannot get anything resembling a jump shot to drop? Then the ball just falls into your hands at point blank range while you are doing garbage duty under the boards. You convert the gimme and all of a sudden you can see the rim from 20 feet and in. This is a gimme in a morning of hard questions:

I’m no economist, so it always takes me quite a bit of puzzling to figure out macro-economic arguments. Recently I’ve been wondering about the Fed’s promise to keep rates low for extended periods of time. Specifically, I’ve been wondering this: whom does that benefit?

[As an aside, it consistently pisses me off that the people trading in the market, who claim to be all about "free markets" and against "interference" from regulators, also are the ones who whine for a Fed intervention or quantitative easing when bad economic data comes out. So which is it, do you want freedom or do you want a babysitter?]

They want asymmetric information distribution, like you get from quant data modeling. Freedom and/or babysitters, that’s another department. Sometimes they want the freedom, sometimes the babysitter, sometimes both. Depends on how that preserves or improves the information asymmetry.

Let’s see if there are any other questions I can answer now that I did the Jane Brody “Focus on situations that you can control, and forget those you can’t” thing and I have The Vision.

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