The Comfort Merchants

I remember a Tuesday in April when my neighbor Ed took out a variable-rate mortgage on his garage. We didn't talk about it much — Ed wasn't one to volunteer information — but I noticed he was looking at paint samples with the careful deliberation of a man trying to make something last forever. It was a simple time. Mortgages were mortgages, and you paid them, or you didn't.

Well.

The headline tells us that "bond traders face heightened risk of imminent Federal Reserve interest rate increase this week." I've been reading this sentence for three days, and I still can't determine whether this is a news story or a plea for help from very nervous men in expensive shirts. Either way, we're watching the slow death of individual responsibility in real time.

The bond traders are "on edge." Markets are "volatile." Investors are "assessing the impact." None of this language admits a simple truth: someone bought something hoping the price wouldn't move, and now the price is moving. This is not a crisis. This is a Tuesday. This is what markets do.

We've wandered so far into the weeds of financial instruments that the basic principle has vanished entirely: buy low, sell high, and live with your mistakes. Instead, we've decided that the Federal Reserve should constantly manage our feelings about money — that volatility is a problem to be solved rather than a signal to be heeded. We've turned economics into a thing we *feel*, rather than a thing we *do*.

Ed would have understood. He took out a mortgage. Interest rates would do what they do. He would adjust his budget, pay his debts, and go to bed without wondering whether Jerome Powell had kept him comfortable today. Because he knew the answer: comfort was his problem to solve, not Washington's.

The real catastrophe isn't the rate increase. It's that we've built an entire apparatus to spare people the consequences of their own choices. Every market intervention, every policy announcement designed to settle nerves, every effort to eliminate volatility — it's all the same message: don't worry, someone else will handle it. You'll never have to adjust. You'll never have to think. You'll never have to be wrong.

The rate increase is coming. It was always going to come. Some people made bad bets. That's how you learn.

— Bob