What if saving the economy was the easy part? ... If the past seven years have proven anything, it's that the biggest danger is often the one that no one sees coming. "You have to worry, otherwise you can't be a central banker," Fed Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer said in a speech this month. "What worries me most is that things happen: You've got a nice framework. It's all organized. You're going down this path, looking left, looking right — something hits you right in the back of the head. "That's what most frightens me. What are we missing?" – Washington Post

Dominant Social Theme: The Fed muddled through, but challenges continue.

Free-Market Analysis: This endless article, excerpted above, is a perfect expression of a favorite establishment meme: The Fed as an innocuous intellectual muddle.

For thousands of words, the article describes the ins and outs of various Fed attempts to salvage the US economy beginning in 2008. Presumably the reason for the article is that this period is now coming to an end. Mission accomplished. The article is meant to be a retrospective.

But in these overly sophisticated times, it wouldn't do to write an article that merely delineates a prolonged triumph. Instead the article drones on about all the different things Fed officials tried to help the US economy come back to life – how they failed and tried again ... and again.

One would not think reading this article that the Fed was an extracurricular banking entity of enormous power that had just illegally lent some US$15 trillion or more abroad to banking entities in danger of shutting down. No mention of that, of course.

The Fed legally has no brief to provide currency to non-US financial facilities but Ben Bernanke apparently did it nonetheless in 2008-2009, sending short-term loans overseas as necessary. Even today, reportedly, these loans have not been returned.

But that is not the point of an article that begins like this:

As the nation's financial system teetered on the brink of collapse seven years ago, top officials at the Federal Reserve huddled inside their marbled headquarters in Washington to brainstorm what it would take to save the American economy.

They called it "blue-sky thinking," and then-Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke led the exercises. The goal was to come up with the most creative, most aggressive, most powerful strategies the central bank could pursue to fight the worst economic downturn in nearly 70 years.

The list was long, and freed from the political and financial constraints of the real world, the suggestions at times felt faintly fictitious. But in fact, the country would require more help than the Fed ever imagined.

The reason that the economy would require so much help is because Bernanke, like Greenspan before him, was determined to keep interest rates artificially low for a prolonged period of time.

However, Bernanke's effort only came after he hiked rates hard in the middle of the first decade, inverting the yield curve that almost inevitably announces a recession.

You won't find any reference to the yield curve inversion in this article, which is not surprising given that despite the massive number of US financial publications very few ever mention Bernanke's hikes within the context of the following subprime crash.

Instead, we get recitations of all the ways the Fed tried and failed to reignite an economy it was responsible for damping in the first place. Inevitably, when the price and volume of currency is "fixed" rather than allowed to settle on a marketplace rate, bubbles form and burst and millions suffer.

That's not emphasized, either. The emphasis of the article, again, is on the endless efforts of the Fed to muddle through. "Even blue-sky thinking didn't anticipate the grinding pace of the nation's recovery, and officials repeatedly found themselves reaching beyond the horizon."

You see? They try hard. They fail. They try again. They are just like us except that they print as much money as they want and send it wherever they wish.

Finally, we are informed, a kind of victory occurs. "Their historic effort is ... coming to an end. This month, the central bank announced it is beginning to phase out its support for the American economy."