When they’re not mismanaging asbestos removal projects and committing mortgage fraud (if you can’t detect the sarcasm there, you need to have your satire meter replaced), the Fed sets monetary policy.

Not always very well, I’ll grant you (and Donald Trump) that. But it’s a hard job. And no, you or I wouldn’t be any better at it than the Fed, although unlike the irritable passenger in the The New Yorker cartoon who, fed up with “smug” pilots, suggests he should fly the plane instead, we probably wouldn’t do a lot worse either.

In a characteristically good little blog post, Cameron Crise on Wednesday took a look at the Fed’s inflation management track record through the lens of Goodhart’s Law. His conclusion: Formalizing an inflation target led to worse outcomes, true to the dictum — when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Anyway, between conspiring to inflate the cost of foundation repairs at the Eccles building and scheming to screw local lenders out of a few basis points on mortgage rates for Atlanta condos, the Fed held a policy meeting last month. (It’s amazing they had time given how busy they are running conspiracies.)

At that meeting, you’ll recall, Chris Waller and Miki Bowman dissented in favor of a rate cut because… well, my take on that varies by the day. When I’m in the mood to sneer, I’m inclined to call them survivalists determined to ingratiate themselves to an aspiring autocrat. When I’m in a pensive mood and not inclined to overwrought derision, I remind myself (and readers) that I too argued for a rate cut at the July meeting and my rationale was more or less the same as Wallers’s and Bowman’s. Given that, I probably shouldn’t be so quick to cast aspersions.

The main takeaway from the account of that meeting, released on Wednesday, was simple enough: Most policymakers agreed with Powell, not Waller and Bowman. “A majority of participants judged the upside risk to inflation as the greater of these two risks,” the July minutes read, referring to the balancing act between inflation still running well north of target and a nascent slowdown in hiring.

The labor market, the minutes reiterated, is (or at least was) “at or near maximum employment,” and the Committee continued to judge that “uncertainty about the economic outlook remained elevated.”

For what it’s worth (previously nothing, now a lot more than nothing given he’s in the running for Fed Chair), Jefferies’ David Zervos says the uncertainty theme itself constitutes a conspiracy. And no, I’m not joking.

On August 4, Zervos penned a client note called “The ‘uncertainty’ hoax” in which he accused Powell of being “a card-carrying member of [the] overly hostile ‘elevated uncertainty’ crew” which, in Zervos’s estimation, is bent on settling “politically-inspired hostilities [with] restrictive monetary policy.”

Never mind that monetary policy may not actually be all that restrictive, if it’s restrictive at all. Zervos would say you have to account for balance sheet rundown too. I wouldn’t disagree were it not for the fact that David’s a ranting, raving partisan, which is to say exactly what he accuses Powell of being except magnified exponentially.

(The word “uncertainty” came up 15 times in the July minutes, much to David’s chagrin, I’m sure. In a Wednesday CNBC interview, Zervos described Powell, a lifelong Republican, as “operating politically from the left.”)

We already heard from Waller and Bowman directly explaining their dissents last month, but just in case, the minutes contained a CliffsNotes version. “These members judged that, excluding tariff effects, inflation was running close to the Committee’s 2% objective, that higher tariffs were unlikely to have persistent effects on inflation [and] that downside risk to employment had meaningfully increased with the slowing of the growth of economic activity and consumer spending,” the account of the meeting said.

All in all, the minutes offered nothing new. Wednesday’s big Fed news wasn’t the account of the July policy gathering, it was Lisa Cook’s Atlanta condo. Just as it should be. (Check your sarcasm meter again.)