It’s been a few years since Japan’s top central banker has been invited to Jackson Hole. The Kansas City branch of the Federal Reserve is today hosting the opening of its annual symposium. Typically, the introduction is given by the President of the KC Fed and then opening remarks from whoever is Chairman of the FOMC.

Outside of those, the idea is to bring together people from all over the world to discuss important monetary and economic topics. In practice, it ends up as an echo chamber exercise in groupthink. The presenters almost always end up being one of two types: central bankers or academic professors of Economics (capital “E”).

Most of the presentations and speeches fall into only one category. They largely congratulate each other for the wonderful jobs everyone is doing, especially those in positions of authority. After a sufficient interval of back-slapping and self-congratulations, they then delve into what have been almost constant mysteries and the unending string of serious problems that accompany them. The contradiction always goes unnoticed.

At last year’s gathering, Norman Chan, CEO of Hong Kong’s Monetary Authority, gave a short presentation. He might’ve been a better guest at this year’s event given that Hong Kong and its dollar are prominent in 2018 for so many “unexpected” reasons. The rest of the panelists could all tell him that he’s handled everything marvelously and expertly before then attempting a discussion on why HKD is causing so much global anxiety.

Anyway, in August 2017 Mr. Chan was brought in to talk about globalization. It was the year of globally synchronized growth, at least as the mainstream talking point narrative, but it was also in the aftermath of poorly received elections throughout 2016. You can see where they were going. Yes, the populists won big but they’ll soon regret they challenged the status quo when the global recovery does finally kick in – as they all expected it would last August.