by James Corbett
corbettreport.com
April 12, 2017

Janet Yellen, Chair of the powerful Federal Reserve Board of Governors, just participated in her first Twitter Q&A, and it all went exactly as well as you’d expect. Worse, even.

The occasion of this particular PR disaster was the latest installment of “Policy Talks @ The Ford School,” an interview and panel discussion series on policy issues hosted by the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. Make no mistake: the “@” in the series title is no mere affectation. These guys are cool cats who are hip to the jive of the youth these days! They even let people interact with their guests by tweeting questions at them!

That’s right, they set the Twitterati loose on Janet Yellen. And the results were predictably hilarious.

There were perceptively cutting questions, like that of @Danstringer74:

Why does inflation only apply to consumption and not assets in the view of the @federalreserve? #fordschoolyellen

— Dan Stringer, SEC Pimp (@Danstringer74) April 10, 2017

There were pointed questions, like this one from @StockCats:

does Central Banks creating money out of thin air to purchase assets, create long-term sustainable economic growth?#fordschoolyellen

— . (@StockCats_2009) April 10, 2017

And there were some brutal digs, like this gem from @RudyHavenstein:

What part of your resume do you feel gives you the best experience at micromanaging a $20 trillion real economy? #fordschoolyellen https://t.co/GgsFZ7DGF1

— Rudy Havenstein, Senior Markets Commentator. (@RudyHavenstein) April 10, 2017

Then there were tweets that made fun of Yellen’s troll-like appearance, tweets asking for a summary of the Fed’s involvement in gold and silver price fixing, and tweets accusing Yellen (probably accurately) of being the one responsible for the now-infamous Fed leak to Medley Global Advisors in 2012. @Oni_no_Hanzo even asked:

#fordschoolyellen What are the plans for the @federalreserve after #Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies make central banking obsolete?

— Hattori Hanzō (@Oni_no_Hanzo) April 6, 2017

In fact, if you look at the #fordschoolyellen hashtag that this event was promoted under on Twitter, you’ll find nary a sign of an earnest question. They’re all various degrees of trolling.

https://twitter.com/CPzzzz/status/850004671619923968

So how did the moderators of the talk handle this disaster? They ignored it. After 10 minutes of introductions and announcements, they conducted a 45-minute interview of blather and nonsense before heading into 15 minutes of audience questions. So in the full 1 hour and 15 minutes of the event itself, they found time for precisely one Twitter question. “Has the effect of QE been underestimated?” (Spoiler: QE was a wonderful thing and created a universe of lollipops and rainbows, according to Yellen.)

But to be fair, even if they had been flooded with intelligent, earnest, friendly softball questions they probably wouldn’t have asked them, either. These “participate via Twitter” gimmicks are always simply that: gimmicks. They are placebo buttons meant to “engage the audience” and make people feel connected. But one thing they are not meant to do is elicit actual participation. The technocrats, globalists and collectivists know better than to do that.

Remember when the Fed created a Facebook PR page…which quickly turned into a PR disaster?

Or when GCHQ joined Twitter…and was immediately torn a new one by angry Brits?

Or when the NYPD started the #myNYPD hashtag…which was promptly taken over by people tweeting about police brutality suffered at the hands of New York’s finest?

Or how every time a globalist swine goes on a C-SPAN call-in show they get dragged through the coals by the public?

Every single time the so-called would-be elite put themselves in a position to interact with the public, the public tears them apart. This is why the powers-that-shouldn’t-be are scared to death of a fair fight on an even playing field. They lose every time. And Janet Yellen just provided us with another example of that rule.

In case you’re tempted to actually watch the video of the event…don’t bother. The only mildly interesting part of the whole event is when Yellen admitted that the low labor force participation rate shows that the official unemployment numbers obscure the actual unemployment situation. But anyone with their head screwed on straight already knew that.

Other than that, the whole thing was an utterly boring snoozefest. Or, to put it in the language of Twitter:

#fordschoolyellen pic.twitter.com/KKXLQIsksJ

— Rudy Havenstein, Senior Markets Commentator. (@RudyHavenstein) April 10, 2017