The fed is in an impossible situation. Raise rates to fight inflation and the stock market tanks and we enter into a recession, unemployment. Or ignore inflation and the middle class is slowly boiled in raising gasoline, housing, and other prices.
Either way the middle class and poor get screwed but the wealthy who took out ultra low interest fixed rate loans to buy up assets all over the country are going to do fine.
Goosing asset prices which are only owned by the richest 55% of Americans, and almost entirely by the top 1%, in order to benefit the lower and middle classes is the same old trickle down economics which had led us to the massive wealth gap we have today.
The solution is to let asset bubbles deflate and do more targeted fiscal stimulus, less monetary stimulus, and use tax policy, not artificially low rate government borrowing, to pay for it. Our government is increasingly ineffective due to political divisions and ideological puritanism so I understand why the fed feels it needs to act but I feel like monetary policy is too broad of a brush that generally only benefits the moneyed elites.
The problem for a lot of the poor and middle class is their elected officials will not talk to them since they don't donate to them. Take Texas for example it is rare for the Texas Senators to actually talk to normal people anymore.
It's a hard problem. Texas has 27 million residents. And 2 Senators.
If they spent an hour a day talking to constituents and spent 15 minutes with each one, it would take 16,875 years to talk to each one, once.
Either way the middle class and poor get screwed but the wealthy who took out ultra low interest fixed rate loans to buy up assets all over the country are going to do fine.