Stuck in a Time Warp With Janet and Jerome
The Rocky Horror Fed Show keeps going. Here’s a wish that this haunted house party of an economic crisis would blast off for another planet.
Tim Curry, Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon in "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" (1975).
Photographer: Michael Ochs Archives/Moviepix/Getty
To get John Authers' newsletter delivered directly to your inbox, sign up here.
After yet another weird day, it feels ever more as though markets, and banks, and monetary policy, are caught in a crazed time warp. It's just like life for the denizens of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Except a lot less fun. To recap: Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell hiked the benchmark fed funds rate by a quarter-percentage point to a range of 4.75% to 5% — pushing it to its highest since September 2007, when rates were about to collapse amid the Great Financial Crisis. This is the ninth straight time central bank policymakers raised borrowing costs since they launched their aggressive monetary tightening campaign over a year ago to curb surging inflation in the US. Maybe it really is time now for this economic haunted house party that won’t end to blast off for a different galaxy.