Attention, you Wall Street readers out there: could this possibly be true?

what could possibly go wrong?

I freely confess to being as ignorant about Wall Street’s doings as the average “financial reporter” is, but this headline caught my eye: “Wall Street’s Smartest Hedge Funds Getting Smacked by Inflation”

Caught flat-footed by the Federal Reserve’s plans to begin tapering its bond purchases — confirmed by the central bank on Wednesday after more than a week of market-churning speculation — a slew of top-tier hedge funds are now coping with losses from overly optimistic bets that inflation is only a temporary phenomenon.

Last week, major money shops including Cedar Rock, Edgewood, Viking, Marshfield, Point72 and Lone Pine appeared to sell out of some stock positions at such a clip that they raised eyebrows, sources told The Post.

According to some insiders, the funds were surprised when bond yields moved against them as it became increasingly apparent the Fed planned to begin to turn off the spigot of bond-buying that has helped prop up the economy through the pandemic.

“Nobody on Wall Street has ever seen inflation in their career — there hasn’t been elevated and persistent inflation in the last 20 years,” said Michael Taylor, managing director at Critical Mass Partners. “The market has changed since the last time we had inflation. Most managers don’t know what to do because they have no experience in this realm but they’re ill-equipped to prosper.”

I’ve had the pleasure of working with some very successful financial types over the years and they’ve invariably struck me as being highly intelligent; indeed, I’ve long thought that the real problem with our country is that the brightest, if not the best, people have been lured away from productive uses of their talent, like manufacturing and engineering, by the chance to make zillions gambling on Wall Street. But have you really entrusted ignorant children with the nation’s economy? And were they incapable of seeing what was coming, as long as a year ago, when the first trillion-dollar tranche was pouring off the printing press?

Again, I give the same credence to reporters on the financial beat as I do all reporters, which is to say, none at all. But reassure me anyway.