Daily Archives: 23 September 2019

Liars Lying

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…for the fun of it. My wife yells at me over elephant jokes, so here are these, instead.

Anansi the spider had a run in with a mosquito, a fly, and a moth.  To determine a winner, Anansi challenged them to a liar’s contest.
Mosquito tells a story of how he plants and harvests his father’s crops because he was very ill.  And to think he did all of this work before he was even born.  Anansi believed the story.
Fly’s story was he attacked a tiger, turning him inside out, freeing a sheep that the tiger swallowed whole.  Anansi believed fly’s story.
Moth told of his hunting expedition where he killed, then cooked an antelope in a high tree.  He was so full he could not climb down the tree to go home. So he got a rope from his house and lowered himself down from the tree and went home.  Again, Anansi believed the story.
Now Anansi told this story. He found a coconut and planted it. Overnight, the plant produced a tree with three coconuts. Chopping open the coconuts, from each flew a mosquito, a fly, and a moth.  Because the coconuts belonged to him its treasure belonged to him. So he decided to each them, but they flew away.
Anansi told them it was his lucky day because they were his mosquito, fly, and moth.  Knowing they had lost the contest, the three flew away in different directions.
Now if Anansi catches them in his web, he eats them as a reward for winning the liar’s contest.

 

I worked all morning building the best ground blind of my life. When I went out in the afternoon to go bow hunting I couldn’t find it.

 

I grew up in a family with 16 children. I never got to sleep alone until I got married.

 

I almost had a psychic girlfriend, but she left me before we met.

 

My grandson is the most persuasive liar I gave ever met. By the time he was 2 years old he could dirty his diaper and make his mother believe someone else had done it.

 

Recently I bought a new car. As usual, they filled the gas tank. My wife and I decided to take a trip to California, so we took off heading west. Our first stop was St Louis where I thought of filling up with gas. Checking the gas gauge, I saw it showed full so we went on. We continued west and at all points along the way the gas gauge continued to indicate full, so I didn’t buy any gas. We spent ten days in Los Angeles and then returned home. I was bewildered as to why I could go so many miles without adding gas.
Upon getting home I took the car back to the dealership where a mechanic soon found the problem. The gauge was stuck on full. He fixed it, and now the gauge drops toward empty when I drive, like everyone else’s.

 

My grandfather could hone a kitchen knife so sharp that grandma could slice off a piece of bread so thin it only had one side. To put butter on, you had to fold it first.

 

Your sister is so thin, she plays hula hoop with a Cheerio.

Powell and Trump

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Nick Timiraos, writing in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, is concerned with messaging from Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to President Donald Trump—is Powell being too subtle, or does he need to answer more explicitly, Trump’s often heated admonishments?  Timiraos is concerned particularly against the backdrop of the often deprecatory nature of Trump’s opprobrium.

This is headed into a cul-de-sac, though.

The question of Fed messaging—to Trump or anyone else—shouldn’t even come up. The Fed’s role is to maintain stable pricing, full employment, and low interest rates.

Full stop.

Accordingly, the Fed Chairman and members of the BoG should stay out of politics. The Fed does its job by setting its benchmark rates at levels historically consistent with its target annual inflation rate of 2%—two of its mandated tasks. Full employment falls out of that.

Having done that much, the men of Fed governance need to sit down and be quiet, accepting that free market forces will cause all three of those goals to fluctuate—and self-correct—except in the most extreme conditions.

All of that precludes, or should preclude, the Fed members from chasing stock/bond markets—and international trade activity, which is much more about foreign policy—politics—than it is about economics.

Powell also is on the wrong path, though, when he says,

The thing we can’t address, really, is what businesses would like, which is a settled road map for international trade. We can’t do that. We don’t have that tool[.]

It’s a tool the Fed doesn’t need.  What businesses need is a stable domestic economic environment. A stable political environment, both domestic and international, would certainly be useful, too, but that’s a…political…environment and up to the political arms of government to generate. It’s outside the purview of the Fed.

It’s especially not the Fed’s job to counteract the foreign policy moves of the Executive Branch.