Jerome Powell, the besuited Oracle of the Potomac and the only man in Washington whose voice can make a billionaire cry by simply clearing his throat, has once again emerged from his mahogany-paneled sanctum to remind the world that he remains the undisputed conductor of our collective economic funeral march. Despite a rare ‘double dissent’ from within the Federal Reserve’s own ranks—a moment of internal friction that the financial press is treating with the gravitas of a schism in the Catholic Church—Powell has maintained his iron grip on the markets. It is a testament to the sheer, unadulterated desperation of our era that we look to a man who essentially manages a glorified spreadsheet as if he were a god king deciding whether the sun will rise. This recent ‘hawkish tilt’ in rate-cut expectations is not a strategy; it is a confession of failure wrapped in the expensive tissue paper of central-banker jargon.

Let’s address the ‘double dissent.’ In any functioning institution, disagreement is a sign of life. At the Federal Reserve, it is treated like a glitch in the simulation. These dissenters, likely weary of the same choreographed nodding that defines the FOMC, have dared to suggest that perhaps, just perhaps, the plan isn’t working. But Powell, ever the high priest of the status quo, has brushed them aside with the practiced boredom of a man who knows that his audience has nowhere else to go. The market, that twitching, cocaine-addled monster we mistake for a civilizational health indicator, reacted with its customary dignity—by oscillating wildly before settling into a state of catatonic obedience. Investors spend their days scouring Powell’s speeches for hidden meanings, treating his every stutter like a message from the burning bush. It is a pathetic display of intellectual servility. We are a species that split the atom, yet we are held hostage by the way a 71-year-old bureaucrat adjusts his tie during a press conference.

The term ‘hawkish’ is itself a masterpiece of linguistic fraud. It’s designed to sound rigorous and predatory, evoking images of sharp-eyed raptors circling their prey. In reality, a ‘hawkish tilt’ at the Fed means they’ve decided to keep making your mortgage unaffordable for a few months longer because they can’t figure out why the numbers they pulled out of their collective backsides in 2021 haven’t balanced yet. They talk about ‘data-dependency’ as if they are scientists in a lab, rather than gamblers at a casino who have already lost their shirts and are now betting the house’s foundation. The truth is that Powell and his cohort are flying a plane with no windows, using instruments that were calibrated for a world that ceased to exist in 2008. Their ‘hold’ on the markets is not based on competence, but on the terrifying realization that if we stop believing in the Fed, the entire house of cards collapses into the sea.

The political response to this is, as expected, a masterclass in hypocrisy. The Left is currently shrieking for rate cuts, not out of any genuine concern for the working class, but because they need cheap money to fund their performative social engineering projects and keep the illusion of a ‘vibrant’ economy alive through the next election cycle. They view interest rates as a faucet that should be left on until the room is underwater. Meanwhile, the Right is busy lambasting Powell for being a tool of the administration, while simultaneously praying for the very same rate cuts so their donor class can pump their portfolios one last time before the inevitable correction. Both sides are grifters in different colored ties, and neither has the courage to admit that our economy is a Ponzi scheme run by people who are too old to understand how Venmo works.

Ultimately, Powell’s hold on the markets is a symptom of a deeper, more terminal rot. We have outsourced our collective agency to a small room of unelected technocrats who believe that the complexity of human life can be distilled into a ‘dot plot.’ We watch the screens, waiting for the smoke to turn white, hoping that the High Priest will grant us the boon of a twenty-five basis point reduction, as if that will somehow fix a society that has forgotten how to build anything other than debt. The double dissent was a ripple in a stagnant pond. The hawkish tilt is just another way of saying ‘we are lost.’ We are all trapped in Powell’s world now—a world where the currency is fake, the growth is borrowed, and the only thing that is truly permanent is the sound of a man in a suit telling you that everything is under control while the walls begin to smoke. It is not leadership; it is a holding action against the inevitable, and we are all paying the price for the privilege of watching the slow-motion collapse.