This year’s April Fools joke from the Federal Reserve is the same this year as every other:
Pretending that a small group of unelected academics can micromanage the economy to create an ideal balance between employment, inflation, and cost of borrowing. The Fed wants to control the economy, but all it achieves is distortion. And when you zoom out, no matter what the Fed seems to do (or which side is in power), all roads lead to inflation and dollar devaluation.
Couched in jargon about discount windows, federal funds rates, and open market operations, the Fed goes out of its way to ensure that its activities remain perennially-inaccessible to the overwhelming majority of Americans. The only thing Powell and his Fed cronies are good at, aside from kicking crises down the road, is fooling people into believing they’ve ever had inflation under control. And as the money supply expands, Americans realize their dollar keeps being worth less over time, but are conditioned to treat it as a natural inevitability.
Powell’s been at it since 2018, but he’s just the latest in a long line of Fed heads playing the same game. The Fed’s history is a comedy of errors, if its boom-bust cycles are to be attributed to incompetence rather than malice. But whether intentional or not, the Fed itself is an institution with such a strong proclivity for egregious conflicts of interest that it might as well be by design.
Under Paul Volcker, inflation was roaring after years of loose money under Arthur Burns. Volcker jacked up interest rates to “tame” it. With a free market to set interest rates, our current rates might be near this level. The problem is, introducing the hubris of human intervention makes it impossible for the market’s natural mechanisms to self-correct and discover the proper price of borrowing according to demand and other factors. So many factors, in fact, that any human attempt to turn predicting them into a science is doomed to fail.
The 2008 bailouts and Ben Bernanke’s “innovation” of quantitative easing were a double slap in the face for Americans—after crashing the economy with fraudulent mortgages, subprime loans, and collateralized debt obligations, the system sacrificed a few big names and then rescued the same banks that collapsed the global economy under the weight of their own fraud.
Then the Fed printed money like it was Monopoly cash. Prices didn’t spike right away, as the effect of inflation takes time to reveal itself, so Bernanke assured America that all was well. But look at the purchasing power of your dollar since then—down the drain, as gold climbed from close to $800 an ounce in 2008 to over $1,900 in 2011. Today, the price is over $3,100.
Gold vs USD, All-Time
Source: TradingView https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/XAUUSD/
Now we’ve got Powell, the latest in a long lineage of April Fool’s jesters. After years of near-zero rates and more QE during the COVID mess, inflation rose more than it had in decades. His response was few measly rate hikes, tip toeing on eggshells for fear of breaking the economy. With hope fading for a truly “soft landing” and stagflation more widely-acknowledged, the situation is predictable: consumer prices are up, wages aren’t keeping pace, and the dollar’s value keeps eroding.
All he’s doing is yanking the same rusty lever every Fed chairman has: print more money, kick the can down the road, and let future generations deal with the wreckage. Under a free market, rates would be much higher. The measures would require major sacrifice and economic pain, but would be the only path toward normalizing the economy.
It’s the same old joke, but it never gets any less funny: central banks can’t “control” inflation in any meaningful way. They can manipulate it short-term, but over the long haul, the dollar just keeps buying less and less. Why? Because the Fed’s entire playbook is built on dollars backed by nothing. When you can print money at will, you’re not solving problems; you’re creating them. The dollar has lost 95% of its purchasing power since the Fed’s founding in 1913. Meanwhile, gold holds steady—which means going up when you measure it in dollar terms. In 1913, an ounce bought you a fine suit and today, it still does. That’s no accident. When you expand the money supply and availability of credit, prices rise.
As Peter Schiff said earlier this month:
“Inflation is not just the expansion of the money supply; it’s an expansion of credit because credit can be used as money…And so the more credit there is in the economy, the more upward pressure there is on prices.”
Powell’s latest gag is pretending he’s fighting inflation while keeping the money spigot open. The Fed’s balance sheet is still bloated at over $7 trillion, down only slightly from its peak. Every rate hike is just theater—window dressing to make you think they’re serious. But the moment the economy really wobbles and their lack of control threatens to show itself in full force, they’ll pivot right back to easing. It’s the same script we’ve seen for decades: sacrifice the dollar to prop up Wall Street. And who pays the price? You, the average American, watch your grocery bill climb while your savings earn nothing.
This isn’t just a Powell problem—it’s a central banking problem. The Fed’s mandate is a fairy tale, and every fiat currency eventually crumbles under the weight of its own excess. Rome’s denarius, Weimar Germany’s mark, Zimbabwe’s dollar—all debased to inevitable worthlessness by overzealous money printers. The U.S. dollar’s just on a slower train to the same destination, as it has more geopolitical buffers that can slow the arrival of the endgame and kick the can down the road.
The talking heads on CNBC were discussing whether the Fed will rescue the markets and the economy. What they don't understand is that the reason the markets and the economy are in so much trouble now is that the Fed came to the rescue so often in the past. The Fed is the problem.
— Peter Schiff (@PeterSchiff) March 28, 2025
So, this April Fool’s, don’t fall for Powell’s act. He’s not controlling inflation or saving us from a recession, and the real fix isn’t in his toolkit—free markets and sound money, like gold, that can’t be conjured out of thin air.
Until then, enjoy the show: Jerome Powell, the Fed’s chief prankster, fooling Americans one presser at a time.
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