One of my first blog posts (and the first one to get any attention) highlighted the amusing/embarrassing irony of having Chinese students laugh at Treasury Secretary Geithner when he claimed the United States had a strong-dollar policy.
I suspect that even Tim “Turbotax” Geithner would be smart enough to avoid such a claim today, not after the Fed’s announcement (with the full support of the White House and Treasury) that it would flood the economy with $600 billion of hot money.
As I noted in an earlier post, monetary policy is not nearly as cut and dried as other issues, so I’m reluctant to make sweeping and definitive statements. That being said, I’m fairly sure that the Fed is on the wrong path. Here’s what my colleague Alan Reynolds wrote in the Wall Street Journal about Bernanke’s policy.
Mr. Bernanke…believes (contrary to our past experience with stagflation) that inflation is no danger thanks to economic slack (high unemployment). He reasons that if people can nonetheless be persuaded to expect higher inflation, regardless of the slack, that means interest rates will appear even lower in real terms. If that worked as planned, lower real interest rates would supposedly fix our hangover from the last Fed-financed borrowing binge by encouraging more borrowing. This whole scheme raises nagging questions. Why would domestic investors accept a lower yield on bonds if they expect higher inflation? And why would foreign investors accept a lower yield on U.S. bonds if they expect exchange rate losses on dollar-denominated securities? Why wouldn’t intelligent people shift their investments toward commodities or related stocks (such as mining and related machinery) and either shun, or sell short, long-term Treasurys? And if they did that, how could it possibly help the economy?
The rest of the world seems to share these concerns. The Germans are not big fans of America’s binge of borrowing and easy money. Here’s what Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble had to say in a recent interview.
The American growth model, on the other hand, is in a deep crisis. The United States lived on borrowed money for too long, inflating its financial sector unnecessarily and neglecting its small and mid-sized industrial companies. …I seriously doubt that it makes sense to pump unlimited amounts of money into the markets. There is no lack of liquidity in the US economy, which is why I don’t recognize the economic argument behind this measure. …The Fed’s decisions bring more uncertainty to the global economy. …It’s inconsistent for the Americans to accuse the Chinese of manipulating exchange rates and then to artificially depress the dollar exchange rate by printing money.
The comment about borrowed money has a bit of hypocrisy since German government debt is not much lower than it is in the United States, but the Finance Minister surely is correct about monetary policy. And speaking of China, we now have the odd situation of a Chinese rating agency downgrading U.S. government debt.
The United States has lost its double-A credit rating with Dagong Global Credit Rating Co., Ltd., the first domestic rating agency in China, due to its new round of quantitative easing policy. Dagong Global on Tuesday downgraded the local and foreign currency long-term sovereign credit rating of the US by one level to A+ from previous AA with “negative” outlook.
This development shold be taken with a giant grain of salt, as explained by a Wall Street Journal blogger. Nonetheless, the fact that the China-based agency thought this was a smart tactic must say something about how the rest of the world is beginning to perceive America.
Simply stated, Obama is following Jimmy Carter-style economic policy, so nobody shoud be surprised if the result is 1970s-style stagflation.
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The U.S. needs to make money. Boost the economy. Generate jobs. Lower costs. Sell more. Increase exports. Collect more taxes. Increase profits. Increasing National Wealth. Make people feel confident and happy again. You must go to the big banks. Give money to major banks. Banks lend money to those who want to produce very low interest rates. The large banks will lend much. will have many happy returns. Profit means the return of money to the government. Cash return of all. For the Government lends atravez all of the Grand Banks. All the money the government borrows the big banks are securities backed by the long-term foreign debt has placed on the market and bought by the Government. Large banks may also buy but only with loans from the Government. The bonds will be purchased by 8% to 12% of face value. The lender will then Government of handling all the applications and money from banks and Government itself. The Government will be the financier of much wealth and so will receive an enormous wealth. Does this wealth internally and externally. The titles can be saved because the wealth will then be backed in his own wealth to develop a trajectory in order to expand irreversibly, putting its dependence on the markets.
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[…] that does not mean the battle is won. Ben Bernanke already has demonstrated that he is willing to curry favor with the White House by debasing the value of the dollar, so what’s to stop him from engineering a back-door bailout by having the Federal Reserve buy […]
[…] that does not mean the battle is won. Ben Bernanke already has demonstrated that he is willing to curry favor with the White House by debasing the value of the dollar, so what’s to stop him from engineering a back-door bailout by having the Federal Reserve buy […]
For all practical purposes, the FED’s money printing is essentially an orderly partial American default: Dilute all debt held in dollars as well as cash held in dollars whether held domestically or internationally. Americans are perhaps playing one of their last cards on their way to what now seems an even more precipitous decline. This last card is credibility.
Once credibility is lost it will be very difficult to regain. Add to that the downward spiraling of “Mitchell’s Rule” or its corollary (“The more voters hurt the more central planning and redistribution they will vote for in their desperation”) and you see how close to the point of no return America really is. Fooled by HOPE of prosperity through CHANGE to lower incentives to produce, Americans may have already gone past the point of no return. The steep ride to the Valley of Mediocrity now awaits.
While past mistakes brought America closer to the rest of the world, America was endowed with such a disproportionate amount of personal freedom at its creation that it always maintained a personal freedom edge over the rest of the world. But all these past mistakes have now accumulated to the point where the American margin of advantage is now thin. So things are different now. Americans have finally arrived close to parity in production incentives with the rest of the world (definitely so for those who live in high tax states such as California and New York). With Obamacare kicking in full force in 2014 America’s fate of decline seems all but sealed.
So make plans. You can either be with the moochers or the suckers, there’s no longer any other option. Or prepare to bail out. Pitchfork economics are coming.